


Revivified Death

by ezlebe



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Blood Kink, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Frottage, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sharing Clothes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:41:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27322153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ezlebe/pseuds/ezlebe
Summary: “We might run into trouble when the other uh, fangs here find out I – I turned you,” Richie says, keeping his voice low and indulging himself a short lean in closer to Eddie, pressing their arms together while he mutters into his ear. “I’m not supposed to. Do that.”Eddie slowly turns and stares for a long beat, then tilts his head with a somehow angry blink. “We’ve been on planes for almost fourteen hours, we’ve hadthreelayovers, and you fucking tell me this now?”
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 47
Kudos: 214





	1. Chapter 1

_“ – fastened and all carry-on luggage is stowed underneath the seat in front of you or in the overhead bins. Thank you.”_

“Oh shit,” Richie mutters, looking up from his phone, as the announcement fades with a click, and belatedly remembering a pretty important detail about three days late. He reaches out, shoving at Eddie’s shoulder in the seat next to him. “Eds – _Eddie_ , we might… Fuck, we’re fucked.” He ignores the peering look of the kid sitting in the row just across from them. “Damn it. I might’ve fucked us.”

“What?” Eddie mutters blearily, a marked golden glow flickering through his eyes in irritation.

“We might run into trouble when the other uh, fangs here find out I – I turned you,” Richie says, keeping his voice low and indulging himself a short lean in closer to Eddie, pressing their arms together while he mutters into his ear. “I’m not supposed to. Do that.”

Eddie slowly turns and stares for a long beat, then tilts his head with a somehow angry blink. “We’ve been on planes for almost fourteen hours, we’ve had _three_ layovers, and you fucking tell me this _now_?”

Richie shrugs weakly, reaching up and running a hand through his hair with a groan. “I just… forgot? It’s a colony thing and kind of why I live there – they do the opposite of want me to bring in new blood.”

“A colony,” Eddie repeats, quietly, then leans back in his seat with a short pinch at his mouth. “Like pilgrims?”

“Like bats,” Richie says, wagging his eyebrows for a beat before the nerves catch back up and he feels his face fall. “Shit. I might’ve fucked this up worse, Eds. We should’ve just tried our luck in Seattle.”

Eddie snorts quietly, then drops his eyes for a quick moment. “Are you not allowed at _all_?”

“I mean, yeah, but if I remember correct it’s a whole process,” Richie says, scrubbing at his face while leaning into the tray table, briefly digging his hands up under his glasses and pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I would’ve had to clear it with like everyone, I think, and get approval that you consented, let them verify you’re not going to go aggro on tourists, et cetera. But shit, I don’t _really_ know – I’ve never looked into it, man!”

Eddie doesn’t respond for a beat. “Why not?”

Richie stares into the dark shadow between his arms and the back of the seat, then swallows back a bitter laugh, forcing himself to sit back up with a glance sideways at Eddie. “It’s mostly partners and stuff. And as you already know, Eds, the last, most _intimate_ relationship I had with a human was with – ”

“Do not!” Eddie snaps, catching on quick with a shove at Richie into the window. “She is fucking dead!”

“So’re we, Spaghetti Man,” Richie says, idly shifting the cover back closed when a slip of light peeks through and threatens to catch his bare hand; announcement or not, the plane is still well above the cloud cover.

“Fuck off, barely,” Eddie says, glaring for a beat longer before his shoulders relax. He keeps staring at Richie though, as his eyes become less mockingly angry and more thoughtful - unreadable. “You uh… We could just tell them that, if you wanted. If it would make it easier?”

Richie blinks back a few times, then raises an eyebrow.

“That we’re like together,” Eddie says, markedly clipped, looking down at his tray table and carefully clipping it into place.

Richie opens his mouth, startled and letting it hang open for seconds, then forces a huff that he hopes doesn’t sound choked. “You would – What?”

“Okay, uh, so… So.” Eddie pauses for a few seconds, then lifts his eyes to Richie’s with an evident determination, his next words in a low voice, if quick and conspiratorial. “What if we already were together, a long time ago, but we lost touch, alright? Because _you_ got – became… You know. But then we just started talking again, maybe we talked about – about uh, us being a thing, and making me one of you maybe after my divorce, but boom, I was dying and you made a snap decision.”

“That is a very thought-out plan,” Richie begins slowly, feeling a disbelieving grin twitch at the corner of his mouth, “To steal Stan and his wife’s werewolf story.”

“Not exactly!” Eddie snaps, leaning back into his seat with an irked eye roll down the aisle toward the front of the plane. “I think I did a better rewrite than _Bill_ could’ve.”

Richie offers a wavering hum, tipping his head back and forth. “Putting all the Loser shit together sounds way worse than one of Bill’s stories.”

“Fuck... Yeah, maybe,” Eddie says, heavy brow furrowing for a pair of beats, then looking sideways at Richie with a small, if affable grin. “I’d rather be where I am than Stan is, though – do you think they shed?”

“I think as a vampire I’m legally required to say: yes, obviously,” Richie says, lifting both hands to gesture forward in front of himself, as if upchucking down into his lap. “I bet he gets hairballs the size of basketballs.”

Eddie snorts just as the seatbelt sign flickers on, hands soon moving along to follow direction. “Can you actually turn into a bat?”

“I can’t,” Richie admits, shaking his head slightly while glancing back and forth from clumsily doing his own seatbelt to Eddie over his glasses. “Other people can.”

Richie stands immediately when the plane lands, mostly to hear Eddie’s little hiss, and incidentally spots a fang he recognizes that is surely on their way to Petersburg. He nods awkwardly at her while deplaning, catching sight of a gaudy, cartoonish Dracula phone case clutched in her hands. He lets his shoulders fall and ignores Eddie’s raised brow, just nodding him forward and trying not to think about how she’s probably been texting half the Clover Pass colony about Eddie.

Eddie proves himself an effective distraction by dragging Richie to the restroom immediately after making a fuss of getting his oversize luggage, shoving him through the swinging door like they’re back in Maine again rather than a ferry ride and a middling drive to Clover Pass. He doesn’t know that, to his credit, and Richie _could_ tell him, but he also just wants to indulge in how eager Eddie is to get him alone, even if it is only motivated by fledge hunger.

“It’s only been like three hours,” Richie says, pretending to be put-upon while Eddie starts tugging at his sweater sleeve.

Richie twitches only a little when Eddie sinks fangs into his arm, intently listening for people who might wander into the restroom. The first time they had done this in the Townhouse, after the terrifying _actual_ first time in the cistern that he’s not going to think about ever, he flinched so badly it made Eddie recoil hard enough to slice Richie’s arm up to the elbow, which was when Bev peeked in, proceeding into a panic attack produced by _her_ particular share of clown PTSD at the sight of all the blood.

It had all around been the worst time, demonstrating all the reasons Richie hated traditional feeding, hated being a vampire, hated what he had _done_ … Yet now he’s comfortably doing it without thinking three days later in a public bathroom.

 _Growth_.

Or he’s still just fucking whipped for ol’ Eddie Kaspbrak.

“Fuck,” Eddie mumbles into Richie’s arm, crimson seeping around his lips while he sucks from Richie’s artery. He pulls off a moment later, a purr in his voice that he maybe, probably, doesn’t actually realize he’s making, “Are you seriously not hungry?”

“Nah,” Richie says, swallowing a little while watching Eddie lap down the wounds as they heal, then forcing himself to look away with a short clear of his throat. “It’s ‘cause you’re a baby.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says, shoving Richie away while turning to the mirror, lifting his chin with a wipe of his thumb across a stained lip.

Richie has never really been into the whole _vampire thing_ ; he tried at the beginning, for obvious reasons, but biting was never more than sticky, the attempted blood bonds never managed to satisfy, and the few guys never seemed to be right, even if they were mostly enthusiastic. He ultimately just decided that it wasn't for him, another bullet point to put on the list of why he was a shitty vampire, but now… He’s starting to think maybe it isn’t that he’s _not_ into the vampire shit, so much as a damned alien murder clown made him forget the one person that might make it super hot. He’s never gotten hard in an airport bathroom in his life, or from getting fed from, but this is now the third time experiencing both in a scant seventeen hours.

“Do I look younger?” Eddie asks abruptly, peering in closer to the mirror with a marked twist of befuddlement at his mouth. “Or are my eyes just bigger?”

“Both?” Richie guesses, watching Eddie raise and lower his eyebrows with an evident study of the wrinkles on his forehead. “I told you, you might change a little.”

Eddie glances backward with an unfairly devastating smirk. “Is this why you look like an unkempt stoner from 1999?”

“Uh, no,” Richie says, lifting both hands to silently tell Eddie to go fuck himself with a pair of fingers. “You asshole, I just was. But I got a little bigger, I guess – I used to be pretty weedy, remember?”

Eddie’s eyes shift in the mirror, fixing Richie with a startlingly intense stare just below his neck, holding there for a beat before they flick to his face; shit, maybe his eyes are bigger. “Right.”

Richie tries not to read too much into the look, shouldering his duffle with a gesture of his chin toward the door. “We’ll let’s get a move on, littlest vampire.”

Eddie reaches out with a swipe, shoving Richie at the sternum and hard into the sink with a thunk, though he doesn’t seem to have meant to by the immediate panicky reach to pull him back with a reach for his shirt. “Shit – Richie!”

“It’s cool,” Richie says, rubbing a little at his hip, then looking up with an exaggerated pout at Eddie’s unsettled face. “ _Someone_ might finally have to learn to control his temper.”

“Fuck off,” Eddie says, hands falling from Richie’s shirt with a sneering eye roll, though the way he then presses his lips together and reaches for his bags seems sheepish. He makes a face when Richie takes one of his oversize Samsonites, but doesn’t say anything, only clearing his throat as they approach the sliding door out to the lot. “Do you live close by?”

“Kind of,” Richie says, tipping his head back and forth while reaching up and pulling his jacket hood up after he catches the glare of sunlight on the pavement. “I live on the north end of the island. It’s like half hour away – like Bangor to Derry, I guess?”

Eddie copies the movement with a blink, warily pulling the strings on his hoodie to better cover his face. “I thought you said it was always cloudy?”

“Like 90% of the time,” Richie says, peering sideways up at the sky from the safety of his shadowed hood, then glancing down to Eddie with a wag of his brows. “Do you want my umbrella?”

Eddie immediately shakes his head, straightening his sleeves over his fingertips. “Uh, no. It looks fucking stupid.”

“Be still my dead heart,” Richie says, putting on a southern belle Voice while clutching over said heart with an exaggerated, shuddering gasp and knocking sideways into Eddie on his next step. “Derry’s Own Doogie Howser calling a health precaution _stupid_?”

“You said that the guy who bit you – ”

“He uses a _spell_ ,” Richie interrupts, maybe a little sharp, humor dampening and thoroughly regretting that he’d ever mentioned Steve at all. He should’ve known better than to expect Eddie not to remember any of that first night, even exhausted and half-dead while the curse took him; his _own_ turning was practically burned into his mind, and it had involved a lot less trauma. “You’ll have to have someone teach you that if you want. Maybe you can do it for both of us.”

“What?” Eddie says, voice pitching with plain annoyance. “Why can’t you – why aren’t _you_ doing it?”

“I told you, I’m garbage at being a vampire,” Richie says, rolling his eyes while pulling his truck keys from his bag. He throws his duffle and Eddie’s luggage in the bed, gesturing for Eddie to do the same, then unlocks the driver side door with a grumbling jerk of the key. He has to lean over to the passenger side to pull the lock, and determinedly ignores Eddie’s judgmental look across the truck cab as a whole.

“You can drop your hood,” Richie says, wincing slightly when the hinge creaks like the door of Barnabas Collins’ crypt. “The tint is 5%.”

“Great,” Eddie murmurs, curling his nose while wiping his fingers across the thick layer of dust on the dash.

Richie turns the key and proceeds to thank all that is unholy that the engine revs to life without the usual choke. “Just say it, Eds.”

Eddie sputters into a laugh, bracing himself against the dash when Richie shoves at the stiff clutch and clumsily forces it into reverse. “This is a fucking beater, Rich.”

“You want to walk?” Richie asks, pretty sure he would be flushing if he had the blood left to do it; it wasn’t just the big stuff he forgot to think about when deciding to bring Eddie back, but the totally mundane aspects, too, like this shitty truck or how he hasn’t _really_ cleaned his place in… maybe years. Shit. “I got it cheap from someone who was moving – I didn’t feel like paying for the ferry from Bellingham.”

“Christ,” Eddie says, his eyes going wide and briefly breaking into a pitchy chuckle when Richie goes over a speed bump – it’s a sound Richie will still gladly humiliate himself to, apparently. “The springs are so _bad,_ too. Is it going to like fucking stop and fall to pieces like a cartoon?”

“Fuck off,” Richie says, laughing himself after Eddie exaggeratedly jerks in his seat when Richie pauses midway down the ramp toward the ferry. He wonders how long it’ll take Eddie to notice how they’re leaving the airport, fairly sure that the realization is going to be a loud one. “I guess I can tell you now: this is the real reason I turned you – I needed a mechanic.”

Eddie shakes his head, lips rolling together in a plain attempt to hide a smile. “I haven’t done that shit since high school.”

“Perfect,” Richie says, easing further down to the ramp and slapping the top of the wheel. “1993, babe.”

“Richie, still that — _Oh,_ you asshole, fuck no. We’re not getting on that, are we?” Eddie says, voice pitching high and promptly changing the subject when he finally notices the small ferry docked at the ramp with space for maybe ten cars, its paint chipped and faded, engine loud with its own knocks. He turns to Richie with a snarl, emphasizing it with a swipe of his hand. “It’s older than this piece of shit Toyota.”

“You want to live at the airport, Eds?” Richie asks, gesturing backward and using it as an excuse to throw an arm over the back of the seat, feeling about sixteen and not even minding the mild sting of the sun against the back of his fingers through the break in the tint. “I thought you _hated_ airports.”

Eddie promptly hunches in his seat, sulking as Richie slowly pulls onto the ferry, teeth scraping and biting down his lip when the boat settles with a small rock. “I’m going to be so pissed if this fucking thing sinks, asshole.”

The ferry manages, as it does every time, to totter over to the other side of the strait with little misfortune, though Richie can't say the same for his seat, as the place where Eddie’s clutches to the old foam bears a print that lasts for miles driving up north. He keeps opening his mouth, trying to think of something meaningful to say about how Ketchikan's not so bad or that he hopes Eddie won’t regret coming back with him, but all that comes out is jokes about the normal size Walmart and whales taking bites off swimming moose.

His driveway is empty when he gets to it, so they’ll probably be able to get settled unharassed for a few hours. He catches Eddie looking around his porch, poking at the small collection of rocks on the sill by the door. The look he receives sideways assures him that Eddie fully realizes he picked them up because they look a bit like dicks.

“Velcome to my house; come freely, go safely – _ouch_ , Eds,” Richie says, backing up with a laugh when Eddie jabs him in the ribs to shove his way past and in the door. “Still no love for the classics?”

“Or your stupid – _Jesus_ ,” Eddie yelps, halfway into the entryway and gaping at the mirror Richie keeps near the door. He gestures back and forth with his carry on, which floats disembodied a few inches from his sleeve. “What the hell? I thought the mirror thing was bullshit – I could see my face everywhere!”

“It’s an antique!” Richie says, slipping past Eddie and dropping his duffle further into the entry. He waggles his fingers in front of the mirror, just near Eddie’s face and grinning when Eddie slaps him away. “It’s got _silver_.”

“Why keep it in the house, then?” Eddie asks, expression twisting while he looks over at Richie, gesturing with his other hand at the mirror. “It’s like fucking useless.”

“Come on, look,” Richie says, throwing an arm around Eddie so they can stand together, in headless sweater and hoodie respectively, pressed back to front like an eerie portrait. “Gotta admit it’s pretty funny.”

“Dumbass,” Eddie says, clearly trying to come off irked and totally failing, as his frowning expression quickly scrunches up with swallowed laughter. He pushes Richie back with a span of his fingers against his chest, every point of pressure startling enough it actually causes a stumble. “I hope the whole place isn’t just a shitty joke.”

Richie hums up and down, regaining his footing and turning to gesture at the door that leads to the main house. “Well. I didn’t know I was bringing you back, Mr Clean, so it might not be up to your standards, but the water and heat work.”

“What an endorsement,” Eddie mutters, picking up the duffle that Richie had dropped and tying it to his own, dragging it all clunking on the hardwood behind him.

Richie leads Eddie through into the kitchen side of a house that a realtor once generously called open plan, slipping along the counter to hurriedly grab and drop a crimson stained mug into the sink. “ _So_ here’s the kitchen, there’s the office slash extra room,” he points over Eddie’s shoulder, flicking his fingers in a wave toward the half-open door. “We, uh, walked through the sorta TV room. There’s laundry and bathroom right there, and –” He points up at the ladder, “A loft, which is sort of the only real bedroom.”

Eddie is quiet for a few beats, his expression a little assessing, though not quite judgmental, not until it drops back down to the Richie. “Okay, but,” he says, turning back and putting his carry-on onto the table, then reaching out past Richie’s arm to tap at the counter. “What the fuck is this?”

Richie turns to look over his shoulder, blinking for a beat before he slowly shrugs with one shoulder. “That is… a bottle warmer, duh.”

Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Duh?”

Richie shoves his glasses up with a short clear of his throat. “It’s for blood.”

Eddie hums shortly, staring at it for a beat longer, then abruptly he looks up with a little too intense of a look for a household appliance. “Where do you keep it?”

Richie rolls his eyes and points with a turn of his hand toward the fridge. “You cannot seriously be hungry,” he says, watching Eddie pull open the door and start yanking on drawers. “ _Eds_.”

“Not me,” Eddie snaps, pulling out a bag with a frown at the labeled date, then turning his assault on the cabinets to apparently find and grab a mug. “The only thing I’ve seen you drink since I _met_ you again is like three gallons of booze. How long does this last?”

“Like a month,” Richie says, trying to feel embarrassed, but instead a giant stupid part of his brain is fucking thrilled; it feels like he’s twelve and getting a squished sandwich shoved in his hand all over again.

“How do you use this?” Eddie asks, hands on his hips and bag clutched in one, bent down peering at the dial on the warmer.

“I just put the bag straight in there,” Richie mutters, scratching down the stubble on his neck while cataloging every little brush Eddie makes at various points against his side; he is, maybe, a little pathetic. “It needs water.”

“Got it,” Eddie says, pressing even closer to Richie while shifting to fill the mug with water. “You have to think about how the fuck am I supposed to eat if you don’t – like, I’m not touching these,” he says, wagging the bag before dropping it into the warmer with a critical look. “Do you even know the background of these people?”

“Uh,” Richie intones, understanding belatedly crashing over him regarding something he should’ve realized between the Townhouse and the airports: Eddie doesn’t eat something unless he knows what is in it. Or, now, _who_. “Not even a little.”

“So fucking eat, dude,” Eddie says, shoving the mug at Richie, then turning to the stairs to the loft while grabbing the carry-on back off the table. “I’m going to put this shit away.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, a little dazed, dropping his head to stare at the warmer as it starts to blink it’s ready to start. He feels his shoulders drop while he reaches out to turn the dial. “Shit."

* * *

Richie had been upset to lose his phone the second he realized it, sacrificed as it was to the fucking Derry sewer, a final little twist of the screw by Pennywise. He did have a few minutes of being a little _thankful_ when he realized it meant none of the fangs in town could call him, but now he’s back to being annoyed, familiar weight missing, not to mention knowing he’s got a newish group of people to annoy with memes and _cannot do it_. The amount of dog jokes he’s got building up at the back of his head has him worried he’s going to forget some of them.

“ – maybe Richie was right.”

Richie raises his eyebrows, pausing while crossing the sitting room and glancing up at the loft with a slightly tilted ear.

“Eddie,” Bev says, immediately disapproving, which is a little rude.

“I know,” Eddie mutters, folding a little too quickly, followed by a conspicuous thump that sounds distinctly like a body onto bedding.

Richie looks back down and blindly reaches for a book, continuing to the sofa and trying to concentrate on the words on the page and definitely not thinking about the implications of Eddie rolling around in his bed, or the fact he took his luggage up there, too. He knows that Eddie said he wanted to pretend if they needed to on the plane, but… Richie hadn’t really expected him to go through with it to a degree. He doesn’t think Eddie realizes the lie would have to go on for potentially _centuries,_ and is positive he doesn’t know that it’ll end up driving Richie a melancholic sort of crazy.

Eddie makes a bitter sort of laugh, unwittingly echoing the mood. “I don’t really want her dead, I guess. Just gone.”

_Oh…_

Shit.

It hadn’t been Richie’s best joke, since the understanding of it depended heavily on knowing he’s prone to upchucking if he tries to actually feed from people already, which he's realized pretty fucking recently was probably because of _repressed memories_ , but he had remembered too late that no one actually _knew_ that, leading to a series of dismayed looks and six people who now think he was serious about eating Eddie’s wife. He can’t imagine she would have been very nourishing _,_ anyway, probably more like whatever Bowers would’ve tasted like if he’d given into that briefly potent instinct in the library.

“We’ll figure it out,” Bev says, pausing for a marked few seconds, then humming lowly, “Both of us. Block her number, though – it’ll be better for your health.”

Eddie is quiet for a conspicuous beat, then snorts, “Fucking ironic.”

“Oh, Eddie,” Bev says, humor re-entering her voice with a gradual huffing laugh. “You’ve got a whole new set of shit to be worried about.”

“You know…” Eddie stops, his pause stretching on enough that Richie begins to dread how he’s going to continue: if he’s been feeling weird from the curse, if he already doesn’t like the small colony life, or if Richie himself has done something wrong without thought. “It’s not that bad. So far, anyway – Richie keeps telling me there’s all this _magic_ stuff, but I haven’t seen him do shit. Not even like Stan with that weird crap with his wife.”

“He didn’t do anything in Derry...” Bev muses, pausing for a few seconds, then ultimately humming loud in some apparent realization. “Oh, except in the cavern.”

Eddie scoffs quietly, grumbling under his breath. “I don’t remember him doing shit.”

Richie grimaces hard, slumping further in the sofa and pulling the book over his face, as if Sabriel is going to keep him from hearing any more.

“You were kind of out of it,” Bev says, briefly a little less composed as her voice drops, falling silent again for a more painful, conspicuous beat. “But when everything was falling apart, I thought I saw him in two places at once while we were moving through the tunnels. He got out first, you know, even with… with you.”

“Fuck,” Eddie says, followed by a noise that sounds worryingly like him getting up from the bed, both feet landing hard on the floor above Richie. “I hate that I can't remember all that.”

Richie throws the book to the window, clearing his throat and looking up to the ceiling to expose himself. “Are you guys having Shitty Parent club without me?”

Eddie noticeably pauses, the creaks of floorboards going silent under his feet.

“We moved on to a shitty spouse club,” Bev answers, belatedly and her laugh a little tense, but her tone evens out quick with wry humor. “Your membership has tragically lapsed.”

Richie swings a leg up to climb the ladder, skipping rungs, to find Eddie looking down at him with a pursed frown. “Unfair,” he says, pausing to pout with only his head just over the floor of the next level, framing his chin with both hands. “Can’t my one time shitty _almost_ spouse story count – I did sort of die, you know?”

“What?” Eddie says, brow furrowing deep while his mouth settles into an unreadable twist that shows just a trace of his fang. “You wanted to marry that guy?”

“What? No,” Richie says, a tense laugh escaping from his lungs without his strict permission, only barely able to swallow back the old reflexive: _who said anything about a guy?_ He climbs further up the ladder, exaggeratedly flopping onto the floor. “But there was sort of an _implication,_ you know.”

Eddie stares for a beat longer, then sweeps his eyes toward the dark tinted window with a hard shift of his jaw. “No, it doesn’t count.”

“Rude,” Richie says, pulling himself up completely and leaning against the post of the bed with a turn of his nose up, then looking down from the corner of his eye at the phone held loosely in Eddie’s hand. “How you doing, Bevvie?”

“Oh, you know,” Bev says, tilting her head and sweeping at her short hair dramatically, as if it could go over her shoulder. “Lawyers, mostly. You want to eat _my_ ex?”

Richie pretends to think while Eddie rolls his eyes across the roof of the loft. “Get me a time and place – maybe I can even turn it into a teaching moment for our Spaghetti Head. I cannot, however, promise to get rid of the body, unless you know any cannibals.”

“Gross, Richie,” Eddie snaps, as if he hasn’t been himself snacking from Richie’s arteries for the last four days.

“Uh, no,” Bev says, stepping through a glass door out onto a patio with a brief flash of skyscrapered horizon. She pulls out a blue pack of cigarettes, tapping it against the railing before going for the ribbon pull. “That I know of, anyway.”

“Oh, hey,” Richie says, reaching out to pick up his own pack from the side table, then crowding in close to Eddie and waving at it the camera with a crooked grin. “You want to recreate the bleachers from two thousand miles apart?”

“And I’m going downstairs,” Eddie says, throwing the phone at Richie with a sneer at the pack while taking a step toward the ladder. “If you’re going to fucking smoke do it out the window.”

Richie slumps exaggeratedly, watching Eddie descend the ladder, then looks down at the phone while directing the camera to watch him throw the cigarettes to the bedside table. “It’s totally empty – I smoked like the entire thing after Mike called.”

“I tried,” Bev says, a noticeable twitch in her expression, eyes briefly dropping before looking right back up. “How’re _you_ doing? Eddie sounded like he’s getting used to it.”

Richie takes a step back and slumps against the bed with a shrug, ignoring an impulse to sink into the duvet to search for a sparse hint of Eddie’s scent. “It’s only been a few hours.”

“Is it just me, or does he look…” Bev lowers her voice, a single brow going up while her eyes dart to the edge of the screen. “Younger?”

“…I think his eyes are just bigger,” Richie says, knowing full well that Eddie is very likely listening from the kitchen, just like he’d been five minutes ago. He hopes _somehow_ Eddie isn’t, though – the way he acted in the airport, this seems like might be something that could give him yet another complex.

Bev's brow goes even higher. “And you know what’s up with that?”

Richie rolls his lips together over his teeth, briefly letting them prick into the flesh. He glances down at the top of the ladder, then looks back out the window with a grimace. “The curse – bite, whatever, is supposed to make you a more effective, like, predator.”

Bev blinks exceptionally slow while tilting her head.

“Like, you know…” Richie takes a breath, trying to think of a good way to describe the whole stupid process when he barely understands it himself. “When it happened to me, I didn’t need my glasses anymore, got bigger, all that shit, but it was also a lot easier for me to do Voices, too, like to adapt myself to roles to lure…” _Prey_. “Food.”

“So, it fulfilled your childhood dream,” Bev says, offering a smirk at the same time that she lifts a hand palm up. “But it’s making _him_ baby-faced?”

Richie gestures widely with both hands, wishing the little edge of her expression didn’t feel so cheerily judgmental. It’s not like he planned it; he thinks Eddie is – _was_ overwhelmingly cute _with_ his wrinkles. “I think… it’s just emphasizing it. Making him seem less threatening? So prey underestimates him.”

Bev is quiet a beat, then pointedly presses her mouth into a flat line. “ _People,_ Trashmouth.”

“Right,” Richie says, nodding slightly while grinning back with a little show of fang; it’s a little fun to joke now after desperately pretending nothing was weird with him in Derry. “…Friends. Not food.”

Bev snorts quietly, leaning back from the camera and crossing one arm over other. “Rewinding here – you don’t need glasses?” She clarifies, waving with a pointed finger and a marked glance up and down Richie’s face. “But you still wear them?”

Richie rolls his eyes, carefully looking away from the screen. “My face looks fucking weird without them.”

“What the shit!?” Eddie abruptly shrieks, his voice ringing loud and irate from downstairs, followed by an unmistakable crash of a mug against a wall. “Get the fuck out, asshole! Have you never heard of knocking?”

Bev blinks up widely through the phone, then hums while a grin cuts across her face. “Sounds like you got to go?”

“Uh, yeah,” Richie says, scrambling to the top of the ladder and leaning down to see to see a familiar blond, bearded face peering up at him. “Oh, _Alek_. Yay.”

“Oh, Alek,” Bev repeats, her voice markedly lower and far more insinuating, which almost makes him want to leave Eddie to it and enlighten Bev on the hundred or so reasons why that’s not even possible.

“Yeah, no – bye, Bev!” Richie says, sparing her a dark look downward before ending the call. He tosses Eddie his phone while scrambling down the ladder and opening his mouth, only for Eddie to swiftly interrupt.

“He just fucking slipped in here like a goddamn ghost!” Eddie snarls, gesturing aggressively now with his phone and eyes lit up solid gold with fury on a rarely startled Alek. “What the fuck, Richie?!”

“Sorry, he, uh,” Richie drags his teeth sharply down his lower lip; he is not prepared for any of this _shit_. “Does that. I should’ve warned – ”

“Warned me? No!” Eddie interrupts, stepping past Richie and looking ridiculous marching up to Alek, who is somewhere around 6’6” in his deck boots. “Richie might not have given a shit, but he’s an idiot – I live here now and you’re goddamn going to knock, you impolite fuck!”

Alek remains quiet for a few seconds, then blinks slowly from Eddie to Richie with a short tilt of his head. “Eivor told me you brought back a friend.”

“Do not ignore me!” Eddie demands, literally snapping his fingers in front of Alek’s nose at a frankly hilarious angle. “I’ve already dealt with a fucking prowler once this week and I stabbed _him_.”

“I will knock in the future,” Alek says evenly, taking a step back and focusing down at Eddie with a typically neutral face. “I apologize.”

“Thank you,” Eddie says, sounding not particularly thankful, his eyes still glowing when he glances back to Richie over a shoulder.

“Yeah, _thanks_ ,” Richie echoes, reaching up and scratching at the back of his neck while forcing himself to look over Eddie’s head at Alek’s face. He had somehow forgotten about Bowers’ near miss, how Eddie could’ve died at the hand of that clown-possessed psycho fuck while Richie was halfway across town pouting in a synagogue.

He _had_ been mourning, too, at least until Stan had sat down next to him smelling like rank dog breath.

“Marion asked me to come by,” Alek says, jaw ticking slightly now, though it’s difficult to tell if his irritation is at being used as an errand boy or at getting shouted at for it. “She wants to speak to you.”

Richie hums flatly, hoping Alek reads his total lack of surprise. “Great.”

Alek glances between blinks at Eddie. “And him.”

“ _Great_ ,” Richie repeats, rolling his head back and forth for a beat, closing his eyes while pushing back his temper; the flat white glow of his eyes isn’t nearly so pretty as Eddie’s gold. “Couldn’t even let me avoid her for a day?”

“Eivor also texted Marion,” Alek says, offering a pointed, almost sullen tilt of his chin. “I don’t care about the fledge.”

“Who has a name,” Eddie snaps, narrowing his eyes at Alek before tipping his head to glare at Richie in a silent scold.

“Oh, I do apologize for the rudeness, sir, this is Alek,” Richie says, purposefully a little obnoxious, putting on a butler Voice while grinning back with teeth at Eddie’s immediate irked frown. “He’s a Viking berserker. Alek, this is Eds – ”

“Edd _ie_ ,” Eddie corrects, his tone a little slurring with the tight scowl around his new teeth.

“ – He’s an insurance adjuster.”

Eddie rolls his eyes hard, leaning into the kitchen table with his hip while directing his glare toward the window. “Risk analyst. Except not anymore, _probably_ , and the firm better still fucking pay out my investments.”

Alek blinks in a way that articulates everything about how he understands nothing of what Eddie is muttering about, but he nods anyway, neutrally polite. “I am also no longer a berserker.”

“Debatable,” Richie mutters, pushing up his glasses with a sharp, worthless breath.

“She wants you to come by during after hours,” Alek says, glancing to Eddie again, then nodding slowly while taking a step back and turning toward the entry. “I am going to leave now. Nice to meet you.”

“Thanks,” Richie calls after flatly, slumping against the counter and ignoring the tickle of Eddie’s stare. He lowers his voice, but doesn’t try too hard to really be quiet. “You awkward fuck.”

Alek’s thumping footsteps pause just out of sight, followed by a vacillating creak of the door. “You didn’t text back. _Dick_.”

“Once a Loser, huh?” Eddie jeers a few seconds later, though his voice is quiet like he’s not sure Alek is really gone.

“And you’ve had your wagon hooked to this train since 1982,” Richie reminds, wagging his brows while looking over to make eye contact, relieved to see the gold has ceded quickly back to brown.

Eddie is quiet for a few beats, then bites out in a low tone. “Do I really look baby-faced?”

“As hell, Eds,” Richie says, offering a sharp grin against Eddie’s irrefutably adorable, if now scowling face. “Literally your whole life.”

Eddie reaches out with a quick, open palm, shoving Richie at the shoulder, and evidently too fast anymore for Richie to easily duck from unless he actually puts in effort. “Fuck off, four-eyes.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who’re you texting?” Richie asks, tipping sideways into Eddie, nearly unbalancing him while peering down at the phone with raised brows.
> 
> “Everyone,” Eddie says, tilting the phone away while his brows furrow down at the screen, words appearing quick from underneath his thumb, ostensibly too concentrated on responding to even shove Richie away. “I guess Bill’s trying to get Mike to help him to write a book about It.”
> 
> “It hasn’t even been a week,” Richie mutters, rolling his eyes while settling back flat on his heels and trying to ignore a mounting ache of being left out. “Tell him to write about vampires.”

“Who’re you texting?” Richie asks, tipping sideways into Eddie, nearly unbalancing them both while peering down at the phone with raised brows.

“Everyone,” Eddie says, tilting the phone away while his brows furrow down at the screen, words appearing quick from underneath his thumb and ostensibly too concentrated on responding to even shove Richie away. “I guess Bill’s trying to get Mike to help him to write a book about It.”

“It hasn’t even been a _week_ ,” Richie mutters, rolling his eyes while settling back flat on his heels and trying to ignore a mounting ache of being left out. “Tell him to write about vampires.”

“Stan already said werewolves, but I don’t think he was serious,” Eddie says, scowling at the phone, then abruptly bursting into a laugh that makes his face light right back up.

“Why are you laughing?” Richie asks, making a face out into the forest at his own tone; great, he feels sixteen and fucking burning with jealousy right now because Eddie laughed at someone else’s joke. “I really need to get a new phone. Fuck.”

“Ben says that it would be funny if it was vampires versus werewolves, but – ” Eddie pauses, scrolling up, thumb sweeping with apparent humor while he briefly looks over to Richie with a grin. “It was really ‘ _just like_ _Pawnee and Eagleton on like Parks and Rec. Or something. Richie is Paul Rudd._ ’ Then Bev did a laughing emoji.”

“My fomo is out of control right now,” Richie says, a little over this second-hand bullshit and reaching out to try to grab the phone. “Eds, let me – ” He whines slightly when Eddie slips out of his arms. “Eddie Spaghetti, please.”

“No,” Eddie says, dodging again, hand skating across Richie’s inner arm with a suppressed laugh that just spurs on another attempt. “Richie! I said – ”

Richie startles when Eddie slips away like smoke, panicking for half a second until he catches Eddie a few yards ahead on the trail under an overgrown tree. “How the fuck – ” He gestures back and forth, jogging slightly to stand next to the visibly frozen figure of Eddie, clearly having not expected to move himself. “Did you just shadow walk?”

“D-Did I?” Eddie says, slowly looking up from the phone still clutched white knuckled in his hands.

“Yeah,” Richie says, furrowing his brow tightly and glancing backward to where they were, then down to the spot Eddie landed in, feeling that bemused sensation he gets whenever anyone does this in front of him. “How did you do that?”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Eddie shrieks, unfreezing and gesturing in a whirlwind of his more typical panic. “I just – I was thinking about getting ahead of you and then I did! Should I be fucking worried?!”

“ _No_ ,” Richie says, shaking his head and reaching out to awkwardly shove at Eddie’s shoulder, then dropping to wrap his hand around Eddie’s elbow to still him for a second before letting it fall back to his side. “You’re good, it’s like a – It’s how Alek got in the house earlier. I’ve just never been able to do it – But you haven’t even had the bite for a _week_ , you asshole.”

“Really?” Eddie says, shoulders falling, looking up at Richie with a pair of bemused blinks. “I didn’t even think about it.”

Richie bites at his lip and steps forward, lightly checking Eddie at the shoulder while moving past him with an overstated pout. “Just shove it in my face.”

Eddie snorts in response, barely letting Richie get ahead. “I don’t even know how it happened.”

“You’ve already surpassed the master!” Richie says, gesturing upward at the dusky sky with both hands and then dropping both over his sternum in a state of disbelief. “Sacre bleu.”

Eddie steps sideways into Richie’s side for a quick, slightly maddening pressure from elbow to shoulder. “If you were the master, we wouldn’t be walking through this spooky ass forest to see your bloodsucker cult leader.”

Richie wets his lips, glancing sideways before looking back at the slightly muddy trail in front them. “Speaking of, uh, are you sure about, you know – ” He almost feels himself choke and has to make himself keep talking, hearing his voice pitch tight. “What you said on the plane?”

“What I said – ? Oh,” Eddie intones, wetting his lips, eyes flicking up to, then away, from Richie’s face with a conspicuous glint of anxiety. “Uh, actually, before we do anything, Rich, I think you should know that – ” He pauses abruptly, expression tightening until he seems to be all furrowed eyebrow. “That I – _Fuck_.” His shoulders hunch and he exhales a startling, out-and-out growl. “I… you _know_.”

Richie tries not to let his face fall, refusing to think about why exactly his stomach is squeezing into a knot. He hadn’t even come up with the stupid story – it shouldn’t feel so much like he’s suddenly being rejected. “It’s cool if you don’t want to.”

“I’m saying _I do_ ,” Eddie snaps, looking up while gesturing flatly outward, nearly making contact with Richie’s hip in a wide arc. He glares for a beat, then drops his hand with a marked clench of his jaw. “I mean it’s more than fine. Whatever. Tell whoever that – that we’re a couple.”

Richie stares at Eddie sidelong for a few seconds, then looks past him toward the glimmer of water out through the trees. “You don’t sound sure.”

“I’m sure,” Eddie says, shoving his phone in his pocket and looking up with that same determination that he had on the plane. “I _want_ to.”

Richie tips his head, forcing his eyes to slide away from Eddie’s startlingly earnest, upturned face. “You uh, know it might have to be for a while. Like we live forever a while. Like that guy you talked to earlier has been with the same person since the Crusades.”

Eddie’s head drops to face down the trail, as his hands conspicuously ball up at his sides. “If you don’t want to, make up your own damned story.”

“Hey, no,” Richie says, hearing his voice pitch, then trying to force it lower with a short cough from empty lungs. “I’m all for it, perfect plan. We can uh, just – Okay. If anyone asks about blood bonds, just scowl or something – it’s probably a dirty joke.”

Eddie responds with a glare from under his brows. “What?”

“Trust me,” Richie says, trying to wave off the question while they turn the corner toward the back entrance of Yaahl Café. “I’ll explain later.”

But literally only if it comes up, because Richie thinks explaining vampire sex to Eddie while also embroiled in this twisted, bogus fulfillment of a teenaged dream to romance him in the normal human way might actually cause a breakdown. He can already feel himself on the quickest path there, especially when Eddie crowds in close to him while they enter the café, reaching down to not-quite hold his hand.

“Richard!” A familiar voice calls out at instant the door closes behind them.

Marion hurries from behind the bar, eyes sweeping up in a long glance at Eddie with her approach and noticeably catching on their hands. She looks to Richie after a few awkward seconds, mouth pressing tight while she throws her braided black hair over a shoulder. “I’m relieved to see you back in one piece. Should I presume this one is… beloved?”

“Yeah,” Richie says, feeling a little choked when cool fingers slip further down to squeeze his palm, and Marion’s heavy gaze is the only thing keeping him from giving into an impulse to look down and confirm he really _is_ holding Eddie Kaspbrak’s hand. “Uh, Eds – Eddie, this is Marion. She’s kind of the mayor.”

“Except I elected myself,” Marion says, straightening the silver bracelet at her wrist before reaching out to shake Eddie’s hand. She holds firmly onto him after he shakes, an assessing look in her eyes, and the meeting is a strong contrast to Alek: Eddie stands ostensibly frozen, staring down at the barely 5’ Marion with the sort of meekness that is entirely the reason Richie didn’t warn him. It would’ve been more awkward with his guard up.

The first time Richie met Marion, she’d walked up to him outside a liquor store, grabbed his arm and told him to come down to Clover Pass before he lost himself to his ego, then virtually disappeared between Richie’s sputtering offense. He had been in Anchorage at the time, had run there first because it was larger and more populated, and he had been, at most, hoping to avoid anyone he’d left behind in LA.

It’s been fifteen years and he hasn’t been able to ask yet if she’s really some kind of psychic or simply just heard him when he was interning overnight at the Top 40 station.

“Please, sit,” Marion says, gesturing Eddie toward one of the booths in the darker, partitioned corner with a short wave of her hand. She takes Richie’s elbow the instant Eddie lets him go, starting to drag him with preternatural strength toward the back. “I only need to speak with Richard for a few moments.”

Richie looks over his shoulder, watching Eddie slip in a booth and stare after them with a familiar anxious expression. “I can’t believe you got me detention again, Eds.”

Eddie relaxes near immediately, shaking his head while crossing his arms over his chest and slumping into the booth. “It was never my fault, Trashmouth.”

“Don’t you rewrite history!” Richie accuses, tempted to attempt a tug out of Marion’s grip just to wag a finger.

“Richard,” Marion says, her voice stern while she yanks him into the cluttered back office. She peeks at Eddie for a beat past Richie’s shoulder, then gestures toward the desk chair, shutting the door behind him with a decisive smack. “You’ve _never_ mentioned any sort of partner.”

“Well, uh,” Richie wets his lips, looking away from Marion and down at his lap as he sits, twisting his fingers in a series to make them crack down the line of his knuckles. “It wasn’t something I wanted to tell anyone about. Yet. We, uh – we had only been talking about it, nothing official, obviously, probably after he got divorced, but then he had an accident.” He takes a nervous, ineffectual breath. “So. Emergency.”

“How long have you even known him?” Marion asks, thin brows furrowing together, gesturing smally in front of herself with a flick of fingers. “Alek said he was… confrontational.”

“Oh, only since we were like _six_ ,” Richie says, looking up, then rolling his eyes when Marion simply presses her lips into an unamused moue. “He won’t be a problem. He only yelled at Alek because he surprised him.”

“You know we have strict… guidelines for these sorts of events,” Marion says, sitting down and flattening her hands against her desk, emphasizing starkly the shifting crests tattooed across them, before then folding them together in a rare show of frustration. “And why didn’t you notify the colony of your trip? You could’ve told any one of us.”

“ _Emergency_ ,” Richie repeats, forcing an awkward laugh that doesn’t seem to have much effect on the tension. “He was literally on the brink. I kind of freaked, Mar.”

“Richard,” Marion says, expression going inert for a beat in a way that has never before this moment reminded him of Stan, but now he’ll never unsee it. “We know nothing about him. You know nothing about him, not really – the curse could have changed him _entirely_ from the man you knew.”

“I’ve been in love with him since I knew what that was,” Richie admits, a little timidly, hoping that their supposed shared love is unspoken enough, as truthfully one-sided as it is, that Marion won’t feel any need to relitigate it with Eddie. “And he’s still that kid, I promise. Like he literally told me he won’t drink blood from bags, let alone actual people – he’s got a germ thing.”

Marion stares for a few beats, then blinks widely and presses her lips together, shifting in her ancient rolling chair with a creak. “And this issue of a divorce?” She asks, lifting a hand to point toward the café with urgent, raised brows. “Why is he _still_ married?”

Richie shrugs hard and pull his arms in closer, feeling stung, and shoves them both into his jacket. “It’s complicated. We lost touch after – ” He gestures at himself with his hands still in his pockets. “But then I uh, looked him up because the internet kind of begs for this kind of circle jerk in personal pain, and I – I messaged him. Not expecting much. But he messaged me back. His wife… recently found out about that.” 

Marion plainly winces, but she’s starting to look more sympathetic. “We have the resources to speed up that process,” she says, reaching over to pick up her tablet with a press of her thumb against the home button, lighting up the screen. “Especially with him here and his spouse…?”

Richie nods with a solid drop of his head. “New York.”

Marion goes quiet for a few beats, tapping at the screen, then tips her head with a thoughtful raise of her brows. “New York is a very large city. I certainly have contacts, should a… less litigious route would be favored.”

“I don’t think he’d be receptive to that,” Richie says quickly, lowering his voice despite the reinforced door, just in case. “He wasn’t when I joked about it. In a kind of serious way.”

Marion presses her lips together, the shape of her fangs traced against them. “You _offered_ to hunt normally?”

“Joked,” Richie repeats, grimacing slightly when Marion slowly puts back down her tablet. Oh shit, she’s going to turn this into a _thing_.

“Circumstances aside, Rich,” Marion says, humming at length while leaning back in her chair. “I think he will be good for you, actually.”

“Why?” Richie asks reluctantly, letting his shoulders hunch while he slumps in his seat, anticipating the borderline psychobabble. He regrets participating in the old cliché of using his bartender as a therapist, trying not to think too hard about the fact she really just mostly sells coffee and blood, and definitely not how she’s spent the last decade and a half treating him more like a son than his own parents.

“You’ve always been very uncomfortable with yourself… in many aspects,” Marion says, proceeding to flay Richie to pieces in a single blow. “It took ten years for you stop insisting to me that the person who offered you the bite was Aaliyah, rather than a particularly distasteful man.”

“Akasha,” Richie corrects weakly, for what has to be the thirtieth time, stilling his hand from moving into a physical face-palm. “Aaliyah was the _actress_.”

“You know how I feel about Anne Rice,” Marion says dismissively, lifting a hand with a spin of her fingers. She swiftly focuses back on Richie, her kindly colony elder expression affixed firmly in place. “The point is that assisting your Eddie through his fledge stage might finally make you confront certain parts of you – I know you believe something is innately weak within yourself, but I am also positive that you could be just as powerful a vampire as anyone else. The fact you turned someone at all is proof of that, even under duress.”

"Maybe," Richie mutters, officially feeling like he’s been pulled into the principal’s office now, listening to how he’s been _wasting_ his _potential_. “Do you want to talk to him?” He asks reluctantly, hoping she won’t insist; his usual strategy, as a teen, had been to bring up that Eddie’s mom might come in if they did, which worked most of the time because she had been pretty universally avoided in Derry, but he is like _almost_ positive that won’t work in this case.

Marion shakes her head, glancing back down to the tablet with a press at it to light up. “After I’ve found him a lawyer. And get yourself a new phone, Rich, I worried you were dead.”

Richie stands from his chair with a mocking bow, which Marion predictably refuses to acknowledge, and turns on his heel toward the door. He reaches out, then pauses with a hard swallow as he takes the handle. “He uh, shadow-walked earlier.”

“Really?” Marion says, the soft taps of her fingertips pausing for a few moments, then starting back up again with little more reaction. “He must be quite confident in his sense of direction.”

Richie stares for a beat longer at the closed door, then shrugs, feeling a smirk grow across his face while he turns the handle. “Yeah, he is.”

The café is a little louder than it had been when Marion dragged him in the office, more conversations between fangs around tables, but the sight he’s most concerned with is the one of a familiar figure crouched over Eddie’s table, staring into what is presumably Eddie’s phone where it’s propped up on the table. Eddie himself is still sitting back in the booth, facing the door to Marion’s office, and he raises a hand the moment Richie sees him.

“So you’re actually Transylvanian?” A tiny _Mike_ can be heard from the phone, prompting Richie to quicken his pace to the table almost to a jog.

“Born and bred, babe,” JJ says, barely reacting to Richie’s arrival and looking stupid while gesturing with a shaka at Eddie’s phone. “It’s not _that_ exciting. Dracula isn’t even real, you know, but I still told everyone it was based on me – easy cred among the useful morsels, could get closer to the big wigs. But Alek couldn’t help but fuck that up more often than not.”

Bill hums in interest, his head popping up tiny next to Mike in a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that make him look like a harried professor. “And Alek is who –”

“What the fuck, you guys?” Richie interrupts, reaching out to snatch the phone out from in front of JJ with a frown down at the screen; he sees a woman briefly poke her head in frame, then disappear, and tries to convince himself it couldn’t really have been _Audra Phillips._ “You should be interviewing me, your best fucking friend, not stroking off fucking Vannabee Vlad over here.”

“Sorry, Richie,” Mike says, head briefly turning on the screen before he returns to whatever notebook he has just out of frame. “I think I’ve got historical events between now and 1976 covered on my own.”

Eddie snorts into the back of his hand, shifting away from the table with a creak of vinyl booth. He reaches for the phone with a crook of his brows, and Richie grudgingly hands it back, watching Eddie set it back against the middle of the table for Mike and Bill.

“Hey there, Richie Recordo,” JJ says, leaning to the side on an elbow, brows going up his forehead at the same time a crooked smile slips across his face. “If you’re wondering if anyone noticed that you fucking up and disappeared – uh, yeah, _yeah_ they did, homes.”

“Sorry, did you miss your stories?” Richie asks sarcastically, glancing away from the peering interest of his friends watching him from a tiny screen on the table like a reverse television. “You might have to learn to read English.”

“Fuck you,” JJ says, as if really offended, turning away from Richie to lean over the table and smack his hand on it in front of Eddie’s seat. “Your boyfriend is a dick, man.”

“It _is_ his name,” Eddie responds, not missing a beat while glancing with a grin over JJ’s head.

Richie regrets letting Eddie shove that blood in his hands earlier when he feels his face warm, hopeful that it’s dim enough in the café that it goes unnoticed. He glances with a blink down at the phone, suddenly quiet, and remembers in a way that immediately drains the flush that none of the other Losers are in on this particular chuck. 

“He left a cliffhanger in the middle of End of Elegy!” JJ exclaims, pulling his hands back to gesture over his head in annoyance, now looking intently back at Eddie, like he’s going to commiserate with _any_ part of this situation. “Clay just got started taking apart that creepy ass wall, he saw a glow of eyes, then – oh shit, last time any one saw Richie, he was at the fucking airport!”

“End of Elegy?” Bill echoes, still a little choked, eyes flicking up through the screen from Richie back to JJ with a pair of startled blinks. “By William Denborough?”

“I don’t know who the author is,” JJ says, a sharp crook at the corner of the mouth when he looks down that belies the statement. 

“Jay,” Alek mutters, appearing with a pair of to-go coffees, setting one on the table in front of JJ with a marked turn of the cup so the opening in the lid faces outward. “Shut your ostobát mouth. You could learn some priorities, you degenerate wastrel.”

“Do not, babe,” JJ says, expression lighting up while he flicks his glasses down across his eyes and picks the cup up from the table with a forward gesture at Alek. “I’ve covered your ass for endless shit over the last millennium and this dude is going to put it in a _book_. The shit with that dumbass seasick horse across the damned Atlantic? That is getting its own chapter.”

Alek is quiet for a beat, then looks down at the phone screen with a flat press of his mouth for Mike and Bill. “Yay.”

Richie rolls his eyes over to Eddie, who raises an eyebrow back, gesturing smally with his chin at the phone and turning his hand just slightly toward JJ. The expression on his face is patently careful, then narrows, and Richie realizes that he must have been trying to make _friends_ , which is just…

It makes something heavy and warm settle behind Richie’s sternum. _He_ doesn’t even want to be friends with these fucks, he’s just forced to by proximity.

“Anyway, gotta bounce,” JJ says, peeking over his shoulder at Richie then back to the phone with an irritatingly smug grin, clearly feeling some kind of triumph and probably at digging out Richie’s previously murky past. He’s been so pushy about it that Richie even once told the truth, though selective childhood amnesia did sound pretty bullshit. “Rich’ll give you my deets, puny humans, then you can learn all about the weird and wonderful life of Józsué Juhász.”

Alek makes a flat, pointed noise, glancing toward the door while taking a sip of his coffee.

“And Alek Veiðikonungr,” JJ amends, then suddenly drops back to his elbows close to the phone, voice lowering to a hoarse stage whisper that has to be sending some awful static into the mic. “TL;DR I’m only with him because he’s tall and his dick’s big.”

“JJ,” Alek says flatly, reaching down and wrapping his hand around the back of JJ’s shirt, tugging him back like he weighs nothing into his side. “Come.”

Richie slips into the booth beside Eddie while watching Alek wrestle JJ out the door, then slowly turns his head with a pointed, mildly put-upon clear of his throat. “So _why_ the fuck where you talking to them?” He glances to the phone, spinning to face him so they can see his scowl. “All of you?”

“They appeared like maybe three seconds after you got dragged away,” Eddie says, gesturing with a twitchy jerk of his hand and a jut his chin toward the arguably main entrance and its cheery red fairy light frame. “I think they were going to try and grill me or something, but then Bill called. At least they offered me coffee.” His tone abruptly sours and pitches upward, “But _apparently_ it has fucking _blood_ in it?!”

“You can order it without,” Richie says, though he wouldn’t be surprised if that hadn’t even occurred to them.

“Like what the fuck?” Eddie hisses, ducking his chin in close to Richie’s shoulder, ostensibly aware enough not to insult the majority of the small café with his overreaction. “What does that even taste like!?”

“It’s like sort of metallic-y,” Richie says, peeking down at the phone to see Bill and Mike pointedly looking down, as if they’re all in the same room and they couldn’t just hang up, if they’re really that uncomfortable with the idea. “Come on, it’s not that bad.”

Eddie all but audibly gags, his expression twisting up in familiar revulsion. “Uh, _no_. Gross.”

“You could even drink it,” Richie says, tilting his head toward the back and vaguely at a door from where a lowlevel hiss of machines is an almost permanent fixture. “It actually goes through this whole process I’ve had explained to me like six times and never really listened to, but the blood is somehow infused into the grounds. Like, you wouldn’t have to worry about any bad disease shit that was in it.”

Eddie seems for a beat like he’s about to just disagree again, then his mouth settles flat and his voice levels back out. “Really?”

“Uh, yeah,” Richie says, glancing over to the counter, putting one hand on the table to start to push himself back up and out of the booth. “Do you want some?”

“No,” Eddie says, reaching out quick and laying his hand a little bafflingly over the one Richie has on the table, holding it there for a pair of conspicuous beats before pulling it back. “I’m good.”

“He was from Transylvania!” Bill bursts out non sequitur, apparently done with being ignored and visibly as excited as he might be if he really just met the actual Dracula, which is just about giving JJ exactly the reaction he wants – thank fuck that he’s no longer in the building. “And his – his… spouse? Are they married?”

“Uh, no? They barely exist like legally,” Richie says, despite the fact he has absolutely no idea; for all he knows, they went through some weird antiquated warrior binding ceremony like 800 years ago.

“Either way, absolutely _fascinating_ ,” Bill says, reaching up and scratching under the bridge of his glasses. “I think Ben may have been on to something – ” He looks over to Mike, who shrugs in a way that is clearly just humoring him. “Combining this sort of thing with what I’m trying to get out of Stan about Patricia’s family could lead to a _very_ compelling black comedy.”

Eddie scoffs sharply, looking over in askance at Richie with eyes definitely wider than they used to be, then back down to the phone. “You’re still going to make them all kill each other, aren’t you?”

Bill is quiet for a beat, then wets his lips. “Maybe,” he mutters, picking up his pencil and scribbling more down on his presumed notes. “Can I get his number?”

“Have to wait until I get my new phone,” Richie says, slumping down further into the booth when he catches a few narrow, disbelieving stares from multiple tables in their direction – or more likely, Eddie’s direction. “Do I look like someone who memorizes numbers?”

“You used to memorize all our numbers,” Eddie says, slowly leaning into Richie, pressing his head against the front of Richie’s shoulder with an odd little twitch at the corner of his mouth. “

Holy shit, Richie is going to dust – it’s like being in the hammock again, except he’s an adult that totally understands why Bill and Mike are looking between Eddie and him like they’ve got two heads. He swallows hard against a dry throat, shifting his arm around Eddie’s shoulder into a more comfortable position, and hopes that the rumor of Eddie having the balls to yell at Alek is enough to keep everyone away for a few days.

He can’t really say the same for Bill or Mike, but apparently Audra Phillips is his new hero, because she drops in at the perfect time with a hand on Mike’s shoulder, just as Bill opens his mouth with a particularly peering look.

“Breakfast just arrived,” Audra says, visibly squeezing, then dropping her hand to the desk near the phone. “If you’re still interested, Michael, it’s even got black pudding.”

“Oh guys, I got to go,” Mike says to the phone, then his head turns upward with a bright grin. He shoves away from the table seconds later, disappearing with Audra, but his voice doesn’t disappear out quite so easily, fading little by little instead the further he gets away. “I’ve been thinking about it since you mentioned it. My grandpa used to make blood sausage when I was a kid, but it was mutton – ”

Bill watches them over his shoulder, then leans into the camera with his hand markedly hovering to hang up. “Mike ordered a full breakfast before 10 – the hotel probably hates us.”

“Oh?” Richie says, raising an eyebrow while glancing to Eddie, who seems to have a similar understanding of what that means by the quick shake of his head down into his shoulders. “That sucks?”

“We’ll talk to you later, okay? I have… other questions,” Bill nods, not even waiting for them to return the sentiment before his finger drops and the call disconnects.

Richie stares at the screen, watching Eddie’s dorky background of some red muscle car that he definitely never owned pop back up. “Did Bill bring Mike into his marriage as a third?”

“Richie!” Eddie snaps, immediately smacking Richie in the chest with a lift of his hand.

“You tell me that isn’t what it seemed like!” Richie argues, gesturing at the now darkened phone. He’s positive Mike and Bill are having a similar conversation on the other side of the world, so he _refuses_ to feel any sort of shame.

Eddie goes quiet for a pair of beats, then abruptly he looks upside down at Richie with a press of the top of his head into his shoulder. “I don’t know!” He exclaims, irked and looking way too cute about it. “He kissed Bev at the Townhouse.”

“ _What_?” Richie makes a point to yelp, then drops his voice into a dryer tone. “That’s actually less surprising.”

Eddie grins back, then looks back down at the table with a shake of his head. “It’s only been like three days – I think he just wanted to get Mike out of Derry quick as possible.”

“Get that,” Richie mutters, firmly ignoring an impulse to drop his chin onto Eddie’s head like some kind of sap. He kind of wishes Eddie still had his heartbeat – the real one, not this slow, plodding one that thumps just enough to keep him moving. He only really got to hear it for a couple days, but it had been nice, always a little too quick, which probably wasn’t healthy, but it had been all him.

“Come on, if you aren’t going to try the coffee,” he says, reluctantly pulling himself out from under Eddie’s weight. “I’m fucking bushed – I haven’t slept in like a week.”

Eddie offers a grimace, climbing out behind Richie with a glance at the door. “Doesn’t she want to talk to me?”

“She said after a few days,” Richie says, winding between tables to the exit, then holding the door open and looking out into the sky, dark and dusky, before glancing back down to Eddie with a weak grin. “Probably just going to ask if you’re nuts shacking up with me.”

Eddie reaches out just when they turn the first corner away from the café, taking Richie’s arm just as it disappears behind the trees. “Do _not_ fucking make fun of me,” he mutters, turning Richie’s arm over with a jerk to get to his bare skin. “But I’m hungry again.”

“You lasted like five hours this time,” Richie says, cheering dryly while Eddie bites down, higher on his arm this time; he wonders if the lifetime of pointless hospital visits actually taught Eddie something, since he always seems to know where to catch the biggest vein. “New record – maybe in six months you’ll sleep through the night, too.”

The joke gets Richie shoved into a tree without Eddie even looking, leading to bark digging into his back while sharp teeth keep latched to his arm. He laughs quietly, closing his eyes, and tries not to get too _preoccupied_ by the soft, damp lap at his arm, shifting his feet and hoping it’s not obvious that he’s trying to relieve some discomfort in his jeans. He briefly has an impulse to return the favor, to lean down and taste Eddie at the exposed skin of his neck, but he easily brushes it off with shame in its wake – the image of himself coming down at Eddie with his crooked, ugly teeth is nothing like this relaxed feeding with Eddie’s little needle fangs.

Eddie pulls off a minute or so later, pressing closer into Richie a beat while licking with finality at the closing wound. “Thanks.”

“No problemo,” Richie says, pulling back his arm while tugging at the sleeve; he brushes his thumb against the fading scar and the brief, fading evidence of Eddie’s mouth, swallowing thickly at a twinge of pain. “Better than my usual plans for the night.”

“Oh, yeah, what were you and – uh,” Eddie makes a face, mouth pinching with an eye-roll to match while he wipes at a messy corner. “Yos-Józsué – ?”

“JJ,” Richie corrects, shoving his hands into his pockets with an eye-roll as they start back down the uneven trail. “They’re neighbors, by the way. Hope you don’t mind sea shanties from three hundred years ago being sung deliberately bad at 4AM.”

Eddie’s face gets more twisty while he takes a beat to side-eye Richie hard, then blinks with a glance back forward while they walk. “What did you mean the stories?” He asks, gesturing in front of them with a shifty, upturned hand. “Do you actually _read_ to people?”

“I do radio,” Richie says, reaching up and scratching at the back of his neck, a little embarrassed, but not really sure why. “Sort of. I read random-ass books with Voices on public access and they pay me. I usually upload it as a podcast after, but I haven’t finish Bill’s dumb book yet. Obviously.”

“So you’re like…” Eddie trails off, looking up at Richie with an odd half-grin across his mouth in a sort of appraisal. “Like a – a one-man serial program? Like a voice-actor?”

“Pretty much,” Richie says, pushing up his glasses and looking away, feeling that flush return to his cheeks at Eddie’s bizarrely approving tone. “It’s kind of popular? So many old fangs must’ve wondered where their _midnight entertainment_ ran off to…”

Eddie starts to shake his head. “If you’re about to say – ”

“I have thought about how much I could make with phone sex, you know,” Richie continues, glancing sideways to catch Eddie’s flat look, then raising into a pitch-perfect version of a Voice he stole from a 1-900 commercial. “I can be anyone you want me to be, Eddie.”

Eddie curls his nose, hunching with what could only be described as a disgusted grimace, which is a little offensive. “You sound like the leper.”

Richie feels his eyes go wide, taken aback and offering a disbelieving laugh. “ _What_?”

“What are you looking for, Eddie?” Eddie says, his voice is crackly and low, nothing like the seductive phone sex operator and not just because he’s a bad mimic. “I’ll blow you for a dime – I’ll do it for free.”

“Holy shit,” Richie mutters, dropping his eyes and trying to come up with anything in response that isn’t straight up awkward; he _does not_ remember Eddie telling them about this aspect of the leper.

“Yeah,” Eddie mutters, hands tightening at his sides then dropping, like he’s nervously trying to grab invisible straps to tug. “Stupid fucking gross bullshit. I couldn’t remember the memory, obviously, but the first time someone tried it, I totally kneed the guy.”

“That sucks,” Richie says, then feels his eyes go wide and his face blanch to what must make him really look like a corpse. “What the – the _guy_?”

Eddie looks over with a stern peer under his brows, then his mouth slants some and he blinks widely in evident disbelief. “I thought you knew?!”

“What?” Richie says, swallowing nervously and reaching up to rub physically at the base of his tight throat. “ _What_?! Knew how?”

“Like the second thing out of your fucking trashmouth after seeing me again was to fucking make fun of me for being married to a woman!” Eddie snaps, getting a little hissy while his eyes flare gold and he steps forward just to stop in front of Richie, seemingly only to stomp at him in anger. “And now you’re telling me you didn’t even really think I was into men?”

“I – I mean, kind of…” Richie forces a laugh, filling it with the sort of humor that he’s not sure is more incredulous or dismayed. “No?”

“You’re such a dick,” Eddie says, scoffing shortly, but his voice has gone a little softer, temper fading in the way that means it was mostly for show. “But seriously? You never even – _ever,_ like not even when we were kids?”

“No, I just –” Richie says, only narrowly managing to choke himself before he can admit that he had only just _wanted_ it. “No.”

“Oh,” Eddie intones, turning back around on his heel with the apparent decision for them to resume walking. He reaches up oddly to scratch at his mouth and chin, holding his hand there for a beat, then dropping it with another: “ _Oh_.”

Richie scrapes his teeth across his lower lip, biting down and tasting a prickle of iron. He doesn’t know what to do with that tone, doesn’t even really want to think about if…

“Helps me fit in more doesn’t it,” Eddie says, an unfamiliar look in his eyes when he glances to Richie. His eyes are still gold, but seemingly no longer from anger, and they almost seem to pin Richie like a bug while dropping to his bloody mouth. “All vampires are a little gay, right?”

“Sure,” Richie says tightly, then offers a tense laugh while looking away, hearing it echo embarrassingly through the woods around them and audibly startle what was hopefully not a bear. “Or a lot. Who can know!”

Eddie keeps quiet a few seconds, the only noise between them their dull footsteps on the trail. “ _Right_ … Who can know.”

Richie finds himself opening and closing his mouth like a frog for the next five full minutes, trying to think of something better to say than awkwardly heaving out more about his own stunted sexuality onto the path in front of them. He knows Eddie knows, and everyone knows, because he told them about Steve while he was freaking about Eddie, and he’d rather eat consecrated dirt than get more questions about that particularly far-reaching, coke-fueled mistake. He almost cheers aloud when they cross into his property, silently thanking the ugly dead stump with his planter on it just for existing, and finds something to do by opening his sliding door with a yank.

Eddie looks oddly at the door before crossing the threshold, visibly hesitating, then turns to look after he finally goes in and Richie steps in after him. “Richie – ”

“You still hungry?” Richie interrupts, pulling at his sleeve and jauntily offering his arm; it feels more like desperation than a joke.

Eddie ignores it and actually openly glares for a tense few seconds. “No,” he eventually says, eyes rolling, then his voice drops a few measures, but not enough to really go unheard. “You dickhead.”

“ _Okay_! The shower is there, and if you don’t close the curtains upstairs, the sun will sort of rise right in your face and it can be really itchy even with the tint,” Richie says, maybe a little too loudly, twisting at the waist to briefly grimace at the office slash studio turned… his new bedroom. Great. It’s closer to the fridge at least, easier to get into if he’s feeling boozy, though drunkenness hasn’t really lasted more than the walk home since he was cursed. “I’ll be in the futon down here, if you need – ”

“What?” Eddie interrupts, shaking his head hard and putting up a hand just like he used to when they were kids, prompting Richie to absently wonder if that’s actually worked with _anyone_ over the last forty years. “No. It’s _your_ fucking bed, Richie.”

“And I bequeath it to you, Señor-ito Spaghetti,” Richie says, gesturing in front of himself with both hands like offering an invisible gift. “I think it still counts even if I died in 2001.”

“I’m not stealing your bed!” Eddie snaps, voice raising high as he gestures upward in an aggressive sweep of his hand. “And – and what if someone fucking sees we’re sleeping in two places? That’ll fuck up the narrative.”

“Eds, what? No one’s going to…” Richie trails off, forcing his eyes to roll while he drags his teeth sharp over his lip, glancing over his shoulder to the ladder for a long beat, then looking back to Eddie with a tense smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. It’s one thing to play at cuddling in public, but _alone_ , in his _bed,_ after Eddie admitted _some_ attraction to men? He might do something really fucking stupid. “Okay, what if we switch off? Like the hammock.”

Eddie narrows his eyes for a long moment, then a peculiar little twist grows at the corner of his mouth. “… _Sure_. Like the hammock.”

“You get tonight,” Richie says, taking a pointed step away with a sweeping gesture between Eddie and the ladder. “You lugged your crap up there, anyway.”

“Wait, Rich,” Eddie says, expression markedly falling as he glances up to the loft, brow furrowing when he looks back down at Richie. “But I said it’s your – ”

“You already said yes!” Richie sing-songs, gesturing widely and raising his voice while turning toward the spare room, refusing to look backward, knowing that even an instant of weakness could give Eddie the leeway that might make him give in. “Begone with ye, vampír.”

Richie waits until he hears the expected muttering scoff, then the creak of the bathroom door, before he pulls his sweater off, then his jeans, scratching up into his hair while debating climbing up for a pair of flannels. He ends up instead wandering over and staring down at the empty futon for a pair of solid minutes, visibly lumpy and hard, and tries not to think much about the last few nights at the Townhouse in similar comfort, but better company. He had spent the majority of his time _then_ with Eddie, hovering while making sure the curse took, which was apparently a far hungrier, angrier process if the person had been horrifically skewered by a spider-clown.

Eddie’s just fine, though, arguably better than, so now they… They’re going to switch off, because Richie himself convinced Eddie it would be better, so consequently is being _particularly_ pathetic. He could also have just fucking agreed to share, but no, he had to act like he was being practical, rather than just panicking at the idea of laying next to Eddie in his own bed.

He’s about a thousand percent sure he said the same crap and felt this same way that first time they didn’t sleep in the same bed at a sleep over. God, he’s got _such_ a hard on for fucking himself over.

Richie tugs a pair of blankets out from underneath the futon and drops the blinds closed further, covering his head while he tucks himself in, just in case, though the tint on the window is the same as it is in the loft. He forces his eyes closed, listening for a long time to various shuffling transfer from the bathroom to the loft, and does _not_ think about how his duvet is going to smell like nothing but Eddie when he has to sleep up there tomorrow.

He doesn’t quite manage to fall asleep, after Eddie goes quiet, but he does manage something almost like it, as exhaustion from the last week takes him close enough that he starts half-dreaming of the flashing, green-grey cavern; of Eddie’s blood spilling over his hands; of Eddie too close to death to drink. He startles awake when he hears a creak from upstairs, thankful for the intervention while he pants anxiously at the ceiling, keeping his eyes squeezed shut against the stickiness of his lashes. He wipes his face hastily against a blanket when he hears Eddie on the ladder, but otherwise keeps still, and almost groans when the footsteps lead right toward him rather than to the fridge or the bathroom.

“Richie,” Eddie says, followed by a solid, if gentle thump on Richie’s shoulder. “Come on.”

“What?” Richie mutters, pulling down the blanket and peering up at Eddie’s stern little frown.

“I can’t fucking sleep with you down here mumbling,” Eddie says, hand snaking in and yanking hard on Richie’s shirt with some of that new strength until he’s off the futon. “Come upstairs.”

Richie tiredly rolls his eyes and lets himself be tugged toward the ladder. “You’re just hungry aren’t you?”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, swatting backward into Richie’s chest before he starts back up into the loft. “You make me sound like a fucking newborn – I bet you went through the same shit.”

Richie hums dubiously, wrapping his hands around a wrung. “If only I’d been like you, Eds.”

“And what does that mean?” Eddie asks, his tone sharp, hands settled defensively at his hips while he watches Richie pull himself up onto the next level.

“Hated drinking from the vein right from the beginning,” Richie admits, taking a loping step forward and flopping down flat onto the bed with a groan into the piled duvet. He then offers a short, insincere chuckle while he turns over onto his back. “Almost fucking starved.”

“Shit, Richie,” Eddie says, kneeing onto the bed and touching at his arm, but he doesn’t move any closer, just presses cool fingers down against his wrist. “You never said that.”

“It’s whatever,” Richie says, turning his head to look at Eddie in the dark, silhouetted grey like something hazy and liminal against the window. “Long time ago. Got my fridge now.”

Eddie is quiet for a few seconds, then when he finally responds, his voice is markedly subdued. “So you don’t like doing it at all?”

Richie closes his eyes, taking a few beats to really think; before Derry, it would have automatically been a no, but now… “I don’t know,” he admits, because he _has_ done it, maybe enjoyed it a little when it was with other fangs, but even then it had never really settled easily. “I didn’t know why before, you know… but now I know it was the clown. Like when It tried to eat you? It was that, I think, in the back of my head always reminding me that I was – am like Pennywise.”

“You are _not_ , Richie,” Eddie says, the grip on Richie’s arm sliding further up his forearm to briefly tighten at his elbow. “You’re not anything like It.”

“Not anything?” Richie asks, huffing weakly, trying to figure out why it’s different with Eddie, who’s got the arguably more traumatic memory of Pennywise coming _at_ him with those teeth out. “When _you_ bite, you don’t –”

“No,” Eddie interrupts, his tone firm and only a little pitchy, going quiet for a few beats before he continues in a low voice: “It just makes me happy that I’m… I’m like you.”

Richie isn’t sure what to make of that, except a joke – _happy_ to be like him? He doesn’t get that at all. He opens his eyes when he feels Eddie start to lie down, stretching out flat on the mattress. “You didn’t eat.”

“I’ll be okay until we wake up,” Eddie says, his voice low, followed by a sensation that might be his fingertips skimming softly down Richie’s arm from inside his elbow to his palm. “Go to sleep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have noticed the chapter count went up, and... well. I got a little sidetracked.
> 
> ~~Also, lets play a game of what old fandom am I getting back into, lol - I was not subtle.~~


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s good to see you! Kind of wondered where you went off to,” Elias says, a grin wide across his mouth, plainly looking up and down Richie with a pair of raised brows. He tilts his head, hand running through his colorful hair to flip it from his face. “Haven’t heard your voice in like a week.”
> 
> “Right, well that’s – yeah,” Richie says, glancing briefly over his shoulder to see Eddie still back by the truck, paused one foot in front of the other while his head is buried into his phone. “I had to go help someone out, ended up bringing him back.”
> 
> “Oh,” Elias says, smile shrinking, a further drop to his head that might be some kind of deflated. “I hoped that was a rumor.”
> 
> Richie stares for a beat, taken aback at the admission; he doesn’t think he’s ever spoken more than two words to Elias. “Nope?”

Richie wakes slow to an unfamiliar weight on his arm, but the familiar itchy feeling of the sun in his face, then opens his eyes wide with a start to stare hard at the ceiling when he remembers exactly what happened last night. He tilts his head some to look down, seeing Eddie curled in close, and isn’t sure if he should concentrate on the anxiety of what Eddie is going to think when he wakes up or be irked that he effectively lost the argument. He fell sleep with no nightmares, at least, unlike downstairs – or, maybe, he just doesn’t remember any of them. He’s glad for it, in either case, particularly wary of reliving the Deadlights vision where he failed, sobbing blood about not saving Eddie and burning slowly to a crisp in the open quarry while the remaining Losers making weak jokes.

He goes still with a swallow when Eddie’s nose presses cool into his neck with a murmur, then pulls back, then forward again, as if searching, and it is suddenly clear why Richie woke up at all. He should pull away, probably, direct Eddie’s hunger away from his neck and down to the less intimate artery in his wrist, but instead what happens is Eddie bites down roughly an instant later, instinctually finding the vein.

Richie chokes a little and tightens his hands into fists on the sheets, hips jerking in a really messed up reflex. He hasn’t been bitten at the throat in years, always found it too visceral, never really this arousing, and after what feels like an eternity later, but is definitely only a few seconds, he feels the fangs rip from his neck while Eddie clumsily, quickly pushes away.

“Shit, _shit_ ,” Eddie says, wiping at his bloody mouth with both hands.

“So that was a weird way to wake up,” Richie says, forcing his hands to flatten, though everything feels a little fuzzy; he should not have let that happen, fuck.

“What the hell, Richie? You could’ve woken me up!” Eddie scolds, going still for a few beats, then looking down at his hands and earnestly starting to lick blood from his fingers like it’s sugar.

“I kind of thought you were,” Richie lies, looking away from the sight of Eddie with fingers in his mouth and using the collar of his shirt to wipe at the stickiness left on his neck. “It’s cool.”

“Stop that,” Eddie says, eyes lighting up as he abruptly climbs back into the bed, latching his mouth right back over Richie’s neck to open the wound back up. He sighs into the bite, tension noticeably easing from his shoulders, mumbling while he feeds, “Fuck – so good, Rich.”

“Thanks,” Richie says, low and definitely a rumble, totally nothing like a squeak.

“Is this okay?” Eddie asks, though he doesn’t exactly wait for an answer. God, that’s just like him; it definitely shouldn’t be so fucking cute.

“All good here,” Richie says, slightly putting on a Voice and certainly not thinking about how it feels like Eddie is totally hard against his hip and nearly right up against his own particular situation. He’s pretty sure the duvet isn’t hiding shit, but Eddie hasn’t said anything, maybe too hungry, so hopefully that’ll all go mutually ignored.

Eddie pulls off the second time with a mildly torturous groan, smoothly rolling away to face the ceiling while smacking at his lips. “Hm.”

“You good?” Richie asks, ignoring an impulse to reach up and press his fingers to where the sensation of Eddie’s mouth lingers, a little cooling patch against his skin, instead trying to concentrate on anything else. He thinks about Pennywise dancing, eyes rolling back in It’s head, and effectively feels his flush fade and arousal flag in seconds.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, clearing his throat with a cough. “Sorry.”

“No biggie,” Richie says, keeping his eyes on Eddie through the corner of his vision, watching his expression twitch, but not toward any specific emotion. “I don’t really know shit about any of this – my fledge stage was… not normal.”

“You said that,” Eddie says, turning his head and suddenly looking back, stained mouth pressing flat toward discontent. “So you didn’t… do this with him? Drink from him?”

“Not after the first time,” Richie says, trying to offer a grin, but he’s pretty sure it does not come off as the intended wry. “I sobered up and had a panic attack, which led to other panic attacks, which led to vomit, then the realization my life was over. Then more vomit. You know how it is.”

“No,” Eddie says, slow, as his expression lilts dangerously toward concerned – his big brown eyes more expressive than ever. “I don’t.”

Richie manages an awkward shrug, looking toward the ceiling with a grimace. “I guess not.”

Eddie starts to move, the mattress shifting under him while he sits up to settle on the edge. “You’re not doing anything wrong,” he says, his voice firm in that surety in bullshit that only he ever seems to manage. “I was dreaming about… drinking, I guess, and then I did it. It’s not your fault.”

Richie blinks a few times, peeking back through the corner of his eye while furrowing his brow. “Like… hunting?”

“No,” Eddie mutters, glancing away from Richie with an odd twitch at the corner of his mouth, bringing up the heel of his hand to press at his forehead. He stays that way for a few seconds, then shakes his head, exhaling a short laugh. “Just, uh. Hungry.”

Richie realizes what that means with a thick swallow, digging his fangs sharply into his lip; _you said you didn’t want to drink from anyone but me_ , he wants to say, instead he just sticks with: “Oh.”

“Shit,” Eddie says, eyes flicking toward the window and pushing out from the bed to look through of it. He reaches out for his phone, “It’s fucking _noon_?”

“We were up kind of late, Eds,” Richie says, watching as Eddie leans in oddly toward the window and hoping that there’s nothing weird going on outside, like a bear, because that would be just his luck, but he’s pretty sure Eddie would be having a fit. “And also… welcome to being sort of nocturnal?”

“I don’t look any more different,” Eddie says, promptly changing the subject while turning from what is apparently his _reflection_ in the window, heavy brow furrowing as he looks hard at Richie. “Do I?”

“Oh, way worse,” Richie says, shoving himself out of the other side of the bed. He looks to Eddie while lifting his hands to close and open his fists in circles around his eyes. “Now you look like one of those lemurs.”

Eddie reaches down and grabs one of his little bags evidently only to throw it, pills inside rattling when they hit Richie’s chest. “Fuck off,” he snaps, then picks up a pillow, as if he’s getting ready to throw that, too. “Go take a goddamn shower – we have shit to do.”

“As you wish,” Richie says, offering a mocking bow while taking a step back, grinning a little to himself when he manages to smoothly transfer down the ladder on the same move without even a stumble.

He starts tugging at his shirt the moment he closes the bathroom door, only to freeze with a start, staring in the mirror at a pink stain stark across his neck; he slowly lets go of the shirt and moves his hand, tracing over it with a pair of fingers, and finds himself swallowing hard against a thick feeling at the base of his throat. He shakes his head hard and forces himself to look away, peeling off his t-shirt then turning on the water, hoping it’s quick to fog the mirror.

He thinks about jerking off the minute he steps under the water, more by habit than anything, though the lingering feeling of Eddie’s mouth isn’t quite nothing – fairly unfortunately, he remembers with a start that Eddie could hear it before he even gets his hand around his cock. He drops his head with a groan, then diverts his reach and grabs the shampoo – okay, he’s going to have to figure out a solution for _that_ right quick.

He finishes rinsing off around the time he suddenly starts to hear voice _s_ over the spray, not quite clear, and turns off the water with a pair of blinks.

“ – started asking me if it was a vampire thing,” Stan says, his low voice echoing down small through the house, colored with apparent frustration. “Like – like as if I fucking know, Eddie. Patty bit me a whole two days before Richie got you.”

Richie hisses through his teeth, realizing that Stan is probably talking about _Bill_ having questions about last night. He throws open the curtain, reaching out for the towel, then pauses halfway through drying out his hair. “Shit,” he mutters, staring at the empty counter and rolling his shoulders forward with a slump. He slowly pulls the towel off his head and hesitates a beat before tying it around his waist; he only has a couple options, and simply going up there half-naked is a _little_ less embarrassing than yelling at Eddie, and by extension fucking Stan, to bring him clothes.

“Did he get like this or was it that we didn’t notice he was fucking oblivious because he was taller.”

Stan doesn’t respond for a beat. “Probably both.”

“It’s not, for the record,” Eddie says, walking across the loft, ceiling creaking above Richie with every harried step, not quite pacing but seeming close to it. “But we’re maybe not quite there yet, either. I’m kind of still… getting around to it.”

Stan offers a small grumble, clearly hearing something there that Richie doesn’t, followed by a clatter that sounds like dishes. “Eddie _._ ”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, voice pitching low in a hesitant swing, perhaps having heard Richie moving around below him. “He just got out of – ”

Richie wraps his hands around the rung, pulling himself up onto the ladder. “Stan the Man!” He crows, interrupting Eddie mid-word while popping his head up into the loft and ignoring the sharp glare he gets for the effort. “Or should I call you Stan the _Wolf_ man – Stani-al the Manimal.”

“Richie,” Stan says, seemingly only on a voicecall, if how the phone is on the table is any way to judge, which will help avoid _some_ embarrassment of the next few minutes of Richie shuffling through the loft. “Good to know for sure that Eddie hasn’t killed you yet. Has anyone told you that you need to get a damned phone?”

“Only like _everyone_ ,” Richie says, sinking his voice into a disdainful teenage Voice, glancing over to Eddie when he realizes he hasn’t said anything – not even to make fun of his hair, which he knows is getting a bit party in the back, or to scold at him for barging in. “What?” He asks, looking down and awkwardly grabbing the knot in his towel, laughing slightly while he climbs the rest of the way up. “Yeah, yeah, I forgot to get clothes.”

“Right,” Eddie says, clearing his throat, glancing down to reach for the phone with a sweep of his fingers across the screen. “Just get dressed – we have shit to do.”

“ _Em_ barrassing,” Stan mutters lowly, emphasizing every syllable.

“I’ve lived alone for like fifteen years, asshole,” Richie says, wandering over to the dresser to pull out the top drawer with a frown; he grabs a pair of shorts, hooking his fingers some socks and a wadded up shirt, then shoves that closed. “Usually I don’t even have a towel.”

“Not you – but hell, Richie,” Stan says, a hint of flat disappointment swiftly threading into his voice. “How many times have your neighbors seen your ass?”

“You can’t see the neighbors,” Eddie says, voice echoing suddenly from more than a couple feet away; a glance backward confirms he went without so much as the creak of a floorboard. He must have shadow-walked again, which is a little …

Envious. Eddie literally uncovered some pure knack for all this vampire shit after four fucking days – it won’t be all that shocking if he manages to get over his hangups about blood by next week, especially after those _dreams_.

“I guess that leaves it to Eddie,” Stan says blandly, entirely unaware of the shift.

“Yeah, fuck off,” Eddie says, voice sharp, followed by a conspicuous clatter of the cupboard. “Talk to you later, Urine.”

Richie snorts loud, then pauses with his fingers on the buttons of his shirt, glancing toward the ladder at the following quiet rumble of the bottle warmer. Okay, he hadn’t thought it would be _this_ soon, but it’s… technically better, though he’ll have to get twice as much blood for the week. He looks back down and finishes buttoning his shirt, running a hand messily through his drying hair, and stretches a few seconds before forcing himself to head downstairs.

Eddie is holding a squat orange mug in his hand when Richie drops to the floor, “Drink,” he says, shoving the full mug between them; oh, he’d been making it for Richie, not himself… which probably shouldn’t be a relief. “I don’t know how much I drank this morning.”

Richie takes the mug, absently noting what Eddie is wearing, then nearly snorts it up his nose when he fully registers that the hoodie across Eddie’s shoulders is _not_ one of his little dorky department store affairs. He glances over his shoulder to the hooks next to the door, seeing a conspicuously empty space, then forces himself to take another gulp almost on a weird reflex when Eddie stares at him hard.

“Are you wearing my – is that _mine_?” Richie asks, finishing the blood, even though it obviously is his; it’s not like Eddie went out and bought a novelty snow crab hoodie while he was in the shower.

Eddie looks down, almost like he has to double check himself, then shrugs stiffly while tugging at a sleeve. “All my clothes are dirty.”

Richie can _sort of_ believe that, even though Eddie had more baggage than a drag queen on tour, because it has been a week, but also: “Really?”

“Alright, fine,” Eddie snaps, taking Richie’s mug with an abrupt tug and randomly starting to clean it out with his eyes fixed down at the sink. “I just don’t want to wear mine anymore, alright?”

Richie blinks slowly, gut tightening some while Marion’s urgent way of asking if Eddie has _changed_ any echoes between his ears. It’s not a huge difference, but it might count as something starting to get there, a beginning of _more_ little changes, but... Richie isn’t quite sure how taking a random hoodie is a curse-induced change. The hunger this morning could count, but that also could be some consequence of Richie’s total lack of ever really trying to set boundaries for the entire time they’ve known each other.

“Do you know the last time I chose my own clothes?” Eddie abruptly demands, almost slamming the mug onto a towel on the counter, which Richie definitely did not set out.

Riche shrugs weakly, feeling his mouth twist while anticipating the answer.

“My first fucking year of college,” Eddie says, gesturing sharply between them with a held up finger very close to Richie’s face. “A single semester, buying my own shit and – and _choosing_ for myself, then my mom fucking shows up and – ” His mouth twists, shoulders tightening up closer to his head while he drops his hand. “It’s not like I remembered why I told her to fuck off, you know!”

“Oh,” Richie says, taking an extra long blink when he knows that his eyes must flare white. He doesn’t want to think about that – of Eddie finally free from Mrs K’s bullshit, then crossing the border and forgetting he ever had the strength to do it.

“And then Myra picked that up,” Eddie continues, looking just to the side of Richie with a tight, angry roll of his lips. “Buying all my shit from like JC Fucking Penny. Everything except the suits.”

Richie is glad Eddie isn’t looking this time, because he’s pretty sure he’s not quick enough to hide that flare of anger.

“Maybe I’ll wear that shit again, I don’t know,” Eddie says, glancing up and then away from the ladder with a jerky little shrug. “If you want me to, I’ll – ”

“No, man, it’s cool,” Richie interrupts, reaching out and grabbing his keys off the couch arm and offering a pointed jingle at Eddie’s front, grinning when his hand is predictably slapped away. “I was just surprised, because that’s like – it’s basically a pictograph about having crabs.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, muttering under his breath. “ _Pictograph_.”

Richie grins back while turning toward the front door. “You ready, Spaghetti? Need a juice box?”

“Shit, wait,” Eddie says, suddenly backing up and diverting bizarrely into the spare room with a few quick steps. He comes back with Richie’s glasses in his hands, but rather than hand them over, he walks up and soundly slips them onto Richie’s face. “Alright.”

Richie blinks a few times, feeling his neck weakly tingle with a flush. “Oh.”

“You look just as good without, though,” Eddie says, walking past out into the driveway with a glance up at the sky.

Richie swallows a little and peeks at the sky himself as he stiffly tugs the front door closed behind Eddie, trying to concentrate on the cloud cover stretching far as he can see, rather than the fact Eddie just sort of complimented his _face_. “So, uh… How about we just go straight to the mall for my phone, then we can figure it out from there?”

“We need to stop for some oil, a filter,” Eddie starts listing, casually counting off on his fingers in a way that is basically throwing them. “More blood, wherever you get that – I saw you were out of detergent, too.”

“Oil?” Richie repeats, shoving the key into the ignition; he freezes a little and winces when the engine does choke this time, but relaxes when it still starts up.

Eddie pointedly presses his mouth into a flat line, eyes flicking toward the dash. “Have you changed the oil in this thing at any time in the last six months?”

Richie looks away, pretending to focus behind the truck like a responsible driver while blowing his cheeks out.

Eddie grouses with further discontent. “A _year_?”

“I don’t drive that much,” Richie attempts, tilting his head while offering a sunny smile; he probably shouldn’t mention that he hasn’t gotten any part of it serviced since he unwisely let JJ replace the radio three years ago. 

Eddie rolls his eyes, slumping backward in the seat. “Might want to price out brakes, too. Clutch.”

“Going to throw the whole-ass engine in there, too?” Richie asks, leering a little, not quite sure if Eddie is serious or just playing into the joke from yesterday.

Eddie goes quiet for a few seconds, markedly tilting his head, then shakes it in what appears to be an earnest answer. “That sounds fine. How many miles – ?” He leans over into Richie’s side, peering down at the dash. “209,000… huh. Maybe.”

Richie breaks into a laugh, raises his brows at the trees while stopping at a sign. “I wasn’t serious, bud.”

“I am,” Eddie says, smacking his knuckles against the passenger side dash with a pointed urgency. “Take care of your shit, Richie.”

“Public radio does not pay that much, Eds,” Richie says, idly trying to imagine the shipping on an _engine_ and stopping himself before it gets too painful. He’d be better off getting a new truck, even if he has sort of had this one a really, _really_ long time.

“Risk analysis does,” Eddie says, quietly, then seems to pointedly clear his throat. “Although, I – “ He taps out an irregular pattern at the edge of the door. “I emailed in my resignation letter this morning.”

Richie looks over between blinks, seeing Eddie staring hard out the window. “Yeah?”

“Technically, it’s early retirement, but…” Eddie trails off into a pause, then offers a weak, markedly uncomfortable laugh. “It’s weird, I guess. I kind of expected to die working there.”

Richie raises his brows at the road, then offers a quiet click of his tongue. “I’m not sure even the curse could save you from being bored to death.”

Eddie predictably starts to snap immediately in defense of a job he _literally_ just quit. “It wasn’t that boring!”

“Just because it drove your blood pressure up, doesn’t mean it was exciting,” Richie says, lilting his voice a little sing-song toward the end while tapping his fingers on the wheel to the beat of the Rush song playing fuzzily on the radio.

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says, followed by a noise that might be him kicking something under the seat with his heel while he continues to grumble. “You have never had a real job in your life.”

“Excuse you,” Richie says, putting on a nasally, valley Voice while offering a tut of sharp disagreement. “I was as receptionist for a massage place in LA for like six whole months.”

Eddie goes gratifyingly quiet for a beat, then scoffs hard. “You were not.”

“Really,” Richie says, leaning forward against the wheel for a few beats in emphasis, looking back and forth from Eddie to the road, then leaning back with a shrug. “It was boring as fuck. Unreal amounts of paperwork.”

Eddie hums lowly, plainly still skeptical. “Really? No joke about happy endings?”

Richie breaks into a startled laugh, looking sideways while he mimes a tear down his cheek. “If only.”

Eddie rolls his eyes with a snort, turning back toward the window with a shake of his head. He seems to study the coast again while they drive, head following with the peeks of ocean; he starts a few half-spoken questions, but none of them really make it anywhere, at least not until his phone buzzes between them. “Oh, Bill wants to know if you’re okay with – ?”

“I’m going to lose my shit,” Richie interrupts pointblank, then lifts his hand from the wheel to gesture at the plaza looming at the next light with the Safeway. “I’m like at the end of the tunnel here. Tell Big Bill to hold it the fuck in!”

Eddie nods slowly, then bursts out a wheezy giggle, briefly lifting his hand to his mouth as if to mute himself before shifting in his seat and curling over the phone, keyboard clicks going off like gunfire.

“You’re all _jerks_ ,” Richie mutters, turning into the lot with a hand up by his eyes like a blinder to hide the phone screen, clumsily shifting down with a sideways jerk of his body on purpose, mostly just to get another laugh out of Eddie. He parks with a sharp clear of his throat, promptly making a grab for the phone, and startles back with his own laugh when Eddie actually _hisses_ back. “Shit, can’t shadow walk in the car, I guess.”

“Shut up,” Eddie mutters, clearing his throat and looking back at the phone with a deeply furrowed brow. “I’m not sure what that was, but you deserved it.”

Richie gasps dramatically, shoving out of the truck with a pointed turn of his nose. He starts toward the store, making a show of not waiting for the creak of Eddie’s door, and regrets his choice to pretend at storming off when he hears a voice call out only steps from the sliding entrance doors.

“Rich? Rich Tozier?”

Richie drops his head a little, reluctantly schooling his face into something that he hopes won’t just look plain annoyed. It takes a minute for him to even recognize that he knows the fang quickly approaching, tall and thin, cyan hair bright against the overcast sky, who he’s seen once or twice in the café.

“Hey! Don’t see you out here that often.”

“Hi, yeah,” Richie says, nodding at the fang – Elias! Right, his name is _Elias_. He points toward the red sign for GCI through the sliding door, so close, yet so far. “Need to pick up a new phone.”

“It’s good to see you! Kind of wondered where you went off to,” Elias says, a grin wide across his mouth, plainly looking up and down Richie with a pair of raised brows. He tilts his head, hand running through his colorful hair to flip it from his face. “Haven’t heard your voice in like a week.”

“Right, well that’s – yeah,” Richie says, glancing briefly over his shoulder to see Eddie still back by the truck, paused one foot in front of the other while his head is buried into his phone. “I had to go help someone out, ended up bringing him back.”

“Oh,” Elias says, smile shrinking, a further drop to his head that might be some kind of deflated. “I hoped that was a rumor.”

Richie stares for a beat, taken aback at the admission; he doesn’t think he’s ever spoken more than two words to Elias. “Nope?” He looks down when he feels a familiar weight press into his side, finding Eddie peering narrowly from under his brows at Elias. “Actually, he – ”

“Eddie,” Eddie interrupts firmly, reaching past Richie without waiting for an introduction this time and holding out his hand with a smile that could be freely described as sharp. “Richie’s partner.”

“Oh,” Elias intones, markedly hesitating a beat before reaching out to take Eddie’s hand with a small shake. “Hi.”

Richie glances between them, sensing and uncertain of a sudden disconcerting tension. He’s also always thought ‘partner’ sounded a little dumb, maybe too neutral, but coming out of Eddie’s mouth it somehow resounds significant, and it definitely didn’t come off to the ear at all like a lie.

“How did you guys meet?” Elias asks, dropping his hand back to his side with a perky smile, belied by the dulling luster of his hair. “The internet?”

“Kindergarten,” Eddie corrects, leaning harder back against Richie’s side, pressing from the shoulder to where he lines his foot against Richie’s sneaker. “He jumped off a swing into my face.”

Elias barely moves, going still in that particular way only afforded to the undead. “Oh.”

“He gave me a band-aid,” Richie says, lifting his leg and tapping just above his kneecap, feeling a little awkward about it when Elias stays unmoving, even his eyes barely shifting up. He clears his throat, nudging Eddie’s shoulder, “And Doctor K was born.”

Elias seems to manage a blink. “You’re a doctor.”

“No,” Eddie says, smirking some while raising a particularly snide little eyebrow that will still undoubtedly get him a lot of shit from Stan. “I’m just prepared.”

Richie rolls his eyes with a snort at the tone, moving to tuck an arm across Eddie’s shoulder and preparing to drag him from whatever weird pissing match this has turned into with a near-literal stranger. “ _Anyway_ , I need to get a phone – good seeing you, Elias.”

“You, too,” Elias says, blinking away from Eddie and unfreezing with a step back, looking to Richie with an expression that’s markedly less confident than his earlier smile. “I – I can’t wait for you to finish End of Elegy, Rich.”

“Thanks,” Richie says, reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck with his free hand. He sighs after a beat and gestures a little back and forth with the one across Eddie’s shoulders. “Tomorrow, maybe? We’re still getting settled.”

“Right.” Elias nods a noticeable pair of times too many, looking down and away while turning, then promptly beelining for a sedan parked near the shoreline.

“He a neighbor, too?” Eddie asks, glancing over his shoulder to follow Elias despite Richie turning him away, slightly resisting the tugging into the Plaza. His brow is furrowed, gold shimmering through his eyes, when he looks back to Richie. “Or just a – a _friend_?”

“Neither,” Richie says, reluctantly letting go once they’re through both sets of doors into the mall. He takes a step toward the GCI, then dithers back with a grimace when Eddie just stays rooted, hastily amending himself when he sees the frustration furrowed between on Eddie’s brows, “Barely an acquaintance. He lives here in town and has book shop or is a librarian, or something – I can’t remember.”

Eddie raises both of his brows, voice clipped, “He acted like he knew you.”

Richie scratches a hand through his hair, wondering a little what the hell about _Elias_ brought this mood on, then realizes with a mildly staggering start that Eddie must have heard Elias say that he hoped that Richie bringing someone back had been a _rumor_. He shakes his head hurriedly, feeling his eyes go wide in a way that probably looks a little deranged. “Only in the way everyone else does? He recommended me a book once – it was some part of the Redwall series, I think.”

Eddie keeps his eyes narrowed in an almost accusatory way, still looking as if there’s really something within that statement not to understand.

Richie clears his throat, gesturing cyclically in front of them. “You know, the mice –”

“I know the books,” Eddie interrupts flatly, staring for a beat longer before looking away with a short shake of his head, instead beginning to peer around the Plaza while slowly losing that accusing curiosity to a more manageable outright disbelief. “Rich, this is _not_ a mall.”

“It’s a bunch of stores inside a big store,” Richie says, gesturing with both hands in a series at the visible storefronts and then spreading them wide to encompass the whole plaza.

“A bunch?” Eddie repeats, reaching out and forcing Richie’s hands down with a firm grip across one wrist. “There’s like _six_.”

“Any amount more than one is a mall,” Richie insists, drawing out his voice with a pursing, downward turn to his mouth.

Eddie responds with a dry look, undeterred by the attempted pout. “The Walmart in Bangor had a nail salon and Dunkin – did that make it a mall?”

Richie blinks back for a beat, then drops his head in a firm nod. “ _Yes_.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Eddie huffs, abruptly reaching out and poking Richie at the base of his ribs with a jab of his fingers. “Go get your phone.”

Richie feels some of the tension in his shoulders fade away, turning and directing Eddie into the store, only to end up wincing against the full spectrum lights and remembering a little why he hasn’t upgraded his phone since 2010. He rubs his eyes a little, catching Eddie glaring upward, and gestures toward the lobby with his chin, only to get a glare for his effort.

“Sir?” A voice calls, followed by a tech in a polo waving Richie over to the counter with a plastic smile. “How can I help you?”

“Need to replace my phone,” Richie says, leaning forward slightly to catch _Hyder_ typed on the name tag, then leaning back while they start to tap quick at the keyboard. “Richard Tozier. Kind of just need the newest of whatever I had? I guess.”

“Alright, no problem, looks like you have in upgrade – Oh, _Tozier_?” Hyder says, looking up with a blink and a suddenly more honest grin. “Are you the guy from the radio?”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie grumbles, followed by evident footsteps taking him swiftly away from the counter.

“Uh, yep,” Richie says, glancing over to see Eddie shaking his head at a wall of cases and power cables. He looks back to Hyder, then down when another tech sets a box between them, watching it get unwrapped with a mild sense of dread; he’s avoided upgrading for so long he’s not even sure his backup is going to work. It had taken him about three years and JJ to even figure out how to do it.

“Cool,” Hyder says, nodding while pulling the phone out with a flip to get to the power button, then holding it out with the apparent assumption Richie is going to know at all what to do with it. “My teacher made us listen to your version of the Hobbit instead of letting us watch the movies.”

“Really?” Richie says, laughing stiffly, furrowing his brow at the little _welcome_ and warily typing in his password – is it… Oh, thank fuck, it was the right one. “Sorry about that.”

“No way,” Hyder said, taking the phone back and starting to tap faster at prompts than Richie can even read them. “She didn’t even tell us you lived here, until like after – we thought you were a real celebrity or something.”

Richie tips his head with a reluctant smirk. “Just small town, I guess.”

Hyder nods a few times, eyes fixed on the screen, and a few silent minutes later he hands it back with a loading bar in the center. “Okay, so this’ll take a few minutes – needs to download.”

“Right,” Richie mutters, looking over his shoulder and incidentally making eye contact with Eddie. He gestures with his chin and raised brows toward the door of the store, realizing Eddie might want to look around rather than stand there, and gets a flat eye roll back, but he wanders that way anyway with a sharp, flippant gesture.

His phone takes forever to download, but eventually he’s finally sending a vampire emoji to Eddie to get him an invite into the group chat. He pauses awkwardly in the middle of the lobby when he doesn’t get a response, looking up and around, trying to listen for Eddie’s slow, thudding heartbeat, but gets impatient in minutes. He doesn’t panic, because he’s not _Eddie_ , but he does… get a little freaked out, peeking into the AT&T just in case, then the toy store, getting more anxious.

He leaves the Plaza a few seconds later, thinking maybe, _maybe_ Eddie went to the truck. He looks out to the spot only to quickly spy a familiar figure on the far end of the lot, well past where they parked and visibly hunched while pacing near the edges of the rocks that make up the narrow shoreline.

“Eddie!” Richie calls out, half-jogging through parked cars and potholes, and quickly rounding in front of Eddie to crowd in close. He glances back and forth across his pinched face, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong. “Eds, you okay?”

Eddie nods a few times, his hands over his face and breathing hard; he drops one and gestures vaguely, but aggressively, tapping at Richie’s chest a few times. He sounds like he’s having one of his asthma-panic attacks, muttering under his breath quick and angry, but right now he’s not quite making sense about whatever it is that set him off.

“Hey,” Richie says, catching the hand and squeezing it hard, hesitantly pulling Eddie closer to him while putting his other hand over his shoulder with a squeeze into a near-hug. “What happened?”

“Heartbeats,” Eddie croaks, peeking up with a jerky turn of his head before squeezing his eyes back shut. “It was – Suddenly, so… so many in my head. _Fuck_.”

“Aw, hell,” Richie mutters, looking out toward the ocean with a drag of his teeth across his lip; shit, so this was set off by fucking _vampire_ thing. He holds Eddie until the harried breaths die down some, into little intermittent wheezes, and squeezes him a little closer to his chest. “Sorry. I didn’t – I wasn’t fucking thinking.”

Eddie straightens little by little, though his hand still holds painfully tight onto Richie’s own. “It’s f-fucked – I don’t even breathe.”

“Hard to get rid of shit that’s in your head,” Richie mutters, briefly and bitterly thinking about Marion’s now decades-long insistence that he essentially just needs to get over himself; she also said this would be good for both of them, but seems like it’s just giving Eddie new reasons for panic attacks. He rocks a little on his heels, tugging Eddie along and ignoring an impulse to bury his face in his hair. “I get that, too, man.”

“It wasn’t shit compared to the airports, you know,” Eddie mutters, glancing backward some at the building with a hard, white-lipped expression. “Like eight people? I don’t know what the fuck happened.”

“Where’d you go?” Richie asks, trying to remember if any place had looked particularly crowded, but he hadn’t been paying much attention to the inside of any store except to see if Eddie had been inside.

“Just wandered around,” Eddie says, gesturing back and forth with a tetchy hand, then tightening that into a fist. “I was in a fucking _fabric_ store.”

“Should’ve known quilting would set you off,” Richie says, forcing his voice into lofty tone, making a point to look wistfully out to the ocean. “I know you hate fun patterns.”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, but there’s humor in his tone, squeezing Richie’s hand with a clearly pointed, painful jerk of his arm. “You really call what you’re wearing a pattern? I think you mean eyesore.”

* * *

“If Stan flies four thousand miles just to kick your ass, I’m not even going to be surprised,” Eddie says, walking out onto the porch with an irked quality to his gait, coming to a stop next to Richie where he’s leaning on the rickety porch rail.

“He’d never,” Richie says, looking up from his phone and taking a moment to give the rest of the group chat a brief reprieve of his frankly glorious discovery of wolfshirt memes. He grins uncomfortably around an old impulse to try and hide the cigarette currently at the corner of his mouth, but of course there’s nowhere to go with it, just like all those various moments in the Derry High parking lot. “It’d have to be a whole itinerary – he would fit me in between whale watching and looking for hummingbirds.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but doesn’t outright disagree, probably because he knows that Richie is exactly right. He does reach out and rip the cigarette from between Richie’s teeth, dropping it to the damp porch and promptly crushing it under his heel.

“You know, Eds, those are pretty damned harmless to me now,” Richie says, turning and leaning back against the railing with both elbows, looking down at the small curl of smoke.

“Still fucking gross,” Eddie says, reaching up and scrubbing a hand through his hair; it’s been loose all day, curling dark and soft across his forehead. “And that means you’re not actually addicted to them, either.”

Richie hums flat and low, pressing his mouth into a line while rolling his eyes up to the roof.

Eddie scuffs his shoe across the porch with a hesitating click of his tongue. “You’ve been out here like an hour.”

Richie shrugs in response, trying to sidestep the unspoken question, though he really has drawn out his excuse of a smoke break too long. It probably doesn’t help that he’s been out here _and_ on the group chat, either; he could’ve been doing that inside, probably, but not so much dealing with the ever-spiraling regret of being the cause of Eddie’s most recent panic attack in public, not to mention who knows how many more future fuck ups just because he panicked, literally cursing his best friend with undeath, rather than the _rational_ alternative of taking him to a fucking hospital.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Richie says, fingers twitching for another cigarette and instead wrapping his hand around the porch. “You shouldn’t have – ” He pauses for a beat, then shakes his head with a weak, somewhat bitter laugh. “Actually, you shouldn’t have to go through _any_ of this shit. It’s all so – ”

“Richie, shut _the fuck_ up,” Eddie snarls, sounding suddenly livid through a clenched jaw.

“Huh?” Richie looks up, surprised some by the vitriol rarely so honestly turned on him.

“Stop saying you’re fucking sorry!” Eddie says, the words quick fire and pitching high, jaw setting square while he lifts a hand to point it up into Richie’s face. “I told you that in Derry. It’s not something that you need to be so goddamn sorry about!”

“And what else should I be?” Richie argues, scoffing while taking his own hostile step forward, but Eddie seems to notice his size about as much as he ever does, which is not at fucking all. “Should I be _happy_ that I – I didn’t even give you the same bullshit illusion of choice that I got? That I fucking forced you into this shitty excuse of a near-life? That you had to fucking leave everything behind, including your _wife_! That now you’re stuck here pretending to be fucking _me_?”

Eddie sneers back for a solid beat while his hand drops into a fist at his side. “Do you seriously think of it like that?”

“Eds –”

“Do not fucking _Eds_ me!” Eddie snaps, his voice piercing louder than Richie’s ever heard it and has to be because of some sort of accidental magic.

Richie shifts his jaw, biting hard into his cheek until he tastes iron.

“I can’t put this off any longer – I’m not _going_ to,” Eddie bites out, dropping hard against the creaky railing with his arms crossing over his chest, looking up at Richie with the sort of intensity that now comes in gold. “I would be _dead_ , Richie, if you hadn’t been there and what you are now. I’d still be down there in that fucking cave.”

Richie shakes his head hard, trying to ignore the Deadlights vision that goes flashing brutally though his mind. “No, you – ”

“I would be,” Eddie repeats with a snap, moving again closer to Richie and uncrossing one arm to gesture with a bony poke at his sternum, while the other keeps clasped firm around his waist, visibly gripping at the hoodie. “I _would_ be and I am so fucking happy to be where and _what_ I am right now, Rich.”

Richie stares back for a few beats, then looks down at the deck, sure his heart would be thudding fast if it could move that quick. He pushes up his glasses a moment later, feeling awkward but words still won’t come, not a single joke; it seems the end of that rope is Eddie talking about being dead.

Being _gone_ dead.

“Would you ever have offered it if Pennywise hadn’t gotten me?” Eddie asks, quieter and a little less assured, inhaling a deep unnecessary breath seemingly just to exhale it hard. “After, if we had both got out fine and – ”

Richie can’t help the bitter scoff, shifting his feet. “You could’ve gone home, Eddie.”

“I could’ve gone home now!” Eddie says, his hand appearing with a wide swing in front of Richie’s face in a way that could only be deliberate. “You really think I didn’t think about that, huh? All you did after saving me was try to convince me that everything could go back to normal, but I didn’t _want_ that.”

Richie wets his lips, glancing up to Eddie while feeling a disbelieving furrow growing across his brow.

“And I wanted to leave, anyway,” Eddie says, dropping his hand and recrossing it over the other, jaw shifting and while his eyes dart out into the forest, offering it a shrug before looking back to Richie with a markedly anxious, if firm gaze. “Leave Myra, leave my job, leave everything. I wanted to so bad before I even remembered, but I could never bring myself to do it – except, then I saw you and I…” He shakes his head in quick jerk. “I knew I was going to _have_ to.”

“Yeah… I – I get that, seeing everyone really –” Richie pauses, blinking a couple of times while re-running the words through his head in a moment of skepticism. “Hold it, do you mean seeing me, like, specifically?”

Eddie is quiet a beat, then looks at Richie with that glint in his eye that he’s finally starting to recognize. “ _Yeah_. Especially the leaving Myra part, Rich. That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

Richie stares back, feeling his mouth drop open, the swiftly closing it to bite at his cheek just to feel the sharp confirmation that this seems to actually be happening to him. 

“Yesterday on the trail and at the café and – and why I fucking suggested all this,” Eddie continues, voice rising swiftly in pitch, then breaking into a choked sort of noise in his throat, before he continues lower, though still just as swift. “Telling everyone we were together. When I did, I thought – I guess that we both sort of had the same… uh, same mentality.”

Richie nods slow, briefly gripping his hands around the porch rail before taking a step forward and turning to collapse down onto the log bench against the house. ‘ _You know.’_ Eddie had said, so emphatically, but no; no, he really hasn’t – he would never even fucking dare _hope_. “So you… ” He exhales a shaky, needless breath, following it with a hard swallow when it doesn’t make any difference. “You’ve known about how I – I… _Me_?”

Eddie is quiet for a few seconds, then shakes his head, first slow, then in a rapid jerk of his head. “I thought so, I guess – I hoped,” he says, reaching up and tugging anxiously at the center of the hoodie. “I knew about the bridge, anyway, and how you felt back then. And that… I think you look at me the same way now.”

Richie is pretty sure he’s going to dust for real; he desperately hopes this might be it, what finally motivates his shitty vampire body to shadow-walk, but no, he’s still stuck here on the porch. “You know about the _bridge_?”

“I know I should’ve said!” Eddie says in a rush, taking a half-step forward toward the bench. “I planned to when, you know, we weren’t in Derry anymore.” He starts to gesture, both hands starting to wind up in a fervor back and forth. “When my mom wasn’t around and we were in like New York or LA, or anywhere, but – _Fucking clown_.”

“Fucking clown,” Richie echoes, then leans down to press the heels of his hands to his forehead, closing his eyes against the discolored planks between his feet. “I’m so goddamn embarrassed right now. Shit, Eds.”

“ _Richie_ ,” Eddie says, voice drawing out and now almost painfully gentle, his fingers softly, briefly making contact with the back of one of Richie’s hands on his face. “Don’t be, okay? I thought it was the most romantic shit ever, even if you never admitted it to my face.”

“How did you even know?” Richie asks, because he had thought he was careful; he thought _no one_ knew about it.

“I found you hanging out there,” Eddie says, the admission hanging for a few charged seconds, until he drops his voice to continue in a lower mumble, “Like four or five times.”

Richie squeezes his eyes harder, until it actually starts to hurt, then drags his hands down his face and sends a mockingly earnest look up at Eddie. “Quick, Eds,” he says, holding a hand out upward with an open palm. “Get me a wooden stake.”

“Shut up, you’re such a martyr sometimes,” Eddie says, kicking away from Richie with an over exaggerated eye-roll. “I thought you were just – scared back then, I guess, like I was, not that you didn’t know how I felt at all.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, swallowing shallowly, watching Eddie pace back and forth across the length of the short porch. “And now?”

“Are you fucking serious?” Eddie demands, rounding back on him with hands going to his hips, “I literally jumped at the chance to move in with you after not seeing you for twenty years!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t have any other choice after I killed – ”

“Don’t with that shit!” Eddie snaps, stepping forward to bear down over Richie, wrapping both hands firm over his shoulders and shaking, until Richie grabs both wrists and forces him to stop with a quiet, shaky laugh. “You didn’t kill me! I am more alive now than I fucking was in New York, Rich! I haven’t thought about allergies, or vitamins, or – or fucking _bacteria_ in a whole week, you asshole! Do you know how freeing that is?”

“I mean,” Richie wets his lips, trying to think of a single time he had ever considered any of those things, aside for if it was related to Eddie. “No.”

“It’s fucking amazing,” Eddie whispers, dropping just enough to press his cool forehead hard into Richie’s, closing his eyes for a long beat. “Thank you.”

Richie stares up at Eddie’s dark, fanned eyelashes for a moment, then swallows hard, but his next words still come out hoarse. “What am I even supposed to say to that?”

Eddie pulls back to make a frown in a familiar, fond sort of irritation. “Your welcome, dumbass.”

“Your welcome, dumbass,” Richie dutifully repeats, ducking his head with a grin when Eddie lifts his hands only to drop them back onto Richie’s shoulders with a dull thwack. He stares down at Eddie’s stolen hoodie for a beat, little snow crab pattern waving cheerily back at him, and chews briefly at his cheek before looking back up. “I do, though – you’re right.”

Eddie blinks a few times, head tilting, “What?”

“Look at you…” Richie says, feeling his throat go tight, as that long-held secret struggles to be freed. “The same.”

Eddie stares back for a beat, then his eyes flicker gold just before drops his head again, pressing his lips hard into Richie’s own startled mouth. It’s not quite aggressive, but close, especially when he opens his mouth to set his teeth sharp against Richie’s lower lip.

Richie groans in reflex, tasting his own blood on Eddie’s tongue, and lifts his hands to hesitantly feel out the shape of narrow hips while his eyes fall shut. He finds himself tilting his head back against the house with a quiet thunk when Eddie eagerly shoves in closer, climbing all but into his lap while thin fingers tighten hard in his hair.

“Richie,” Eddie says, pulling back a few seconds later, pressing his mouth messily against the corner of Richie’s, then down against his jaw. “I don’t know how you – you never noticed that I fucking do, too.”

“We should probably go inside,” Richie says reluctantly, wetting his slips while staring up into bright gold eyes, a little anxious, a lot thrilled, shifting his hands against a buzzy anticipation under his palms where they clutch at Eddie’s waist. “Unless you want to be the next story for Bill.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, though he remains motionless for a few seconds, then hastily leans down and presses another hard kiss to Richie’s mouth. He moves away in the next moment, stretching his shoulders back, then marches through the front door with a somewhat violent yank on the handle. He’s already going up the ladder when Richie gets through the door, despite efforts of moving just as quickly, his ass most of what Richie sees in a way that nearly makes him burst out laughing in sudden memory.

“You know…” Richie says, reaching out and palming at the enticing shape of Eddie’s thigh in a way he never had the guts to in the clubhouse, laughing at the startled little squeak it elicits before sliding his hand lower to wrap his fingers at a knee. “I think I bought this place knowing one day I’d get to look at your ass above me multiple times a day.”

“Shut up,” Eddie huffs, kicking out with his heel while sending a glance down that is outright molten.

Richie feels any next words choke at the base of his throat, wetting his lips before moving to follow Eddie up the ladder with nerves like bees between his ears. He feels a bit like it’s all going to slip away once his head crosses the threshold, but instead he sees Eddie is already tugging at his hoodie by the time he pulls himself up.

Eddie folds both it and his shirt up together in a swift, visibly practiced move before throwing them at the stack of his luggage. He looks over his shoulder, eyes sweeping slowly down Richie, then turns around completely to reveal the third or fourth biggest surprise of the day.

“Holy shit, Eds,” Richie says, staring at Eddie’s midsection in disbelief – he does _not_ remember this at the townhouse, and he had… Actually, no, it had been Ben who changed Eddie’s shirt out of the – the bad one, hadn’t it? No, that doesn’t matter, he literally could not have missed Eddie being a pocket-size Thor. “You get all weird about your wrinkles, but not about the six-pack?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, a smirk growing wide into a grin at the corner of his mouth while he follows Richie’s gaze downward. “This is twenty years of not wanting to go home.”

“Damn,” Richie mutters, looking back up to Eddie’s face with a showy display of reluctance for it. “I probably would’ve just gone to bars.”

Eddie immediately shakes his head with an endearing little curl of his nose. “A hundred percent of the bars in New York have rats.”

Richie narrows one eye, then the other one, ultimately clicking his tongue. “I’m not sure that’s an accurate statement.”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, walking forward and gently directing Richie toward the bed with a pair of taps at the middle of his chest. “You don’t fucking know.”

“More accurate,” Richie allows, sinking down onto the bed with a swallow when his thighs hit the edge of the mattress; he looks up at Eddie for a pair of seconds, then slowly takes him between his hands and urges him to follow down onto his lap. 

“Richie,” Eddie says, once he’s settled onto Richie’s thighs, hands slipping up to cup at Richie’s jaw while he seems to be trying to mesmer with his big brown eyes, which shouldn’t work, but also kind of has since elementary school. “You should bite me.”

“Eds,” Richie says, wincing some and self-consciously sliding his tongue over the uneven backs of his teeth.

“You don’t have to,” Eddie says quietly, leaning in closer while sweeping his thumbs up against the soft edges of Richie’s cheeks, pressing a little as if to get against his fangs. “But I _want_ you to. I – I think about you biting me all the time.”

Richie almost jokes that it’s just a dumb fang instinct, something to ignore like the heartbeats, but he swallows it back; it’s not as if he hasn’t been thinking about it, too, as much as he tried otherwise. He wets his lips, blinking a few times when Eddie reaches up to take off his glasses in a way that is pretty damned presumptuous. “Where?”

“Like everywhere, I guess?” Eddie says, leaning back away and looking down at his bare chest with a twist of a smirk.

Richie turns his head, dropping it slightly to nose at the bicep of one arm over his shoulder. “What about… just here?”

“Sure,” Eddie says quickly, shifting with a particularly distracting wiggle of his hips to inch some impossible amount closer.

Richie hasn’t bitten anyone in years, hasn’t had to deal with the messiness of veins, how he has to work to pierce flesh or the way the blood spills onto his tongue, delicious and inspiring a feral urgency that still, decades later, worries him. He forces himself to unlatch after only a few seconds, realizing his hands are gripping tight into Eddie’s jeans, but he can’t keep from briefly flattening his tongue across the wound for an impulsive last taste. “Shit,” he murmurs, absently registering that he’s licking at his lips, his teeth, trying to get more and surely not being sexy at all; it’s really good that Eddie isn’t human, because he – he tastes _so_ fucking good, he wants to drink him _dry_. “Haven’t… done that in a while.”

“Richie, god,” Eddie says, sounding himself winded, and that is definitely his hard cock firm against Richie for the second time today. He actually grinds down, which is a shock, suffice to know that it’s certainly not going to go unmentioned this time. “I’ve been thinking about this for days.”

“Fuck, really?” Richie says, forcing his hands to loosen and slip up to hold at the shape of Eddie’s ribs, hesitantly dropping his head again and licking against Eddie’s elbow to capture a remnant drip. He shifts to expose his neck when Eddie rocks forwards again, reflexively inhaling a little when sharp teeth bite down, inciting a warm, almost fuzzy feeling to surge between them with a pleasant near-hum. Oh, a bond, he hadn’t…

“What is that?” Eddie says, pulling back with a blink of confusion, maybe a little alarm, flexing his arm a few times as if it has to do with the limb. “Like I – I can feel that _you_ feel good.”

“Blood – feeding bond,” Richie says, closing his eyes while the sensation spreads to his fingertips; he’s never felt one so… _nice_ before, pleasantness buzzing deep under his skin and into his bones. “Mentioned it at the café, remember?”

“Why didn’t I feel it before?” Eddie demands, sliding a hand up into Richie’s hair, fingers swirling absently and soothing against his scalp. “I always feed from you.”

“Didn’t share,” Richie says, slowly turning and nipping at Eddie’s collarbone for more little flecks of iron, nervous and excited, hearing Eddie hum in punches against every sucking bite. “Together at the same time… magic thing, I guess.”

Eddie nods with a short drop of his head, then abruptly pulls back and shove Richie down so his back is flat on the mattress, bond flaring and eager between them. “You know,” he says, a noticeable, low purr in his voice, as his fingertips settle just over the hem of Richie’s jeans to touch cool at his bare skin. “I almost thought this morning was on purpose, but I know you’re really just a mess.”

“Shut up,” Richie says, tugging his shirt off with a put-on frown, startled a little to feel Eddie’s low satisfaction flare between them from the blood. He stares a little when Eddie slides off him to undress the rest of the way, ignoring a slow rush of heat trying to flush his neck; he’s had _way_ too much blood today. “Maybe it was on purpose.”

“Uh huh, sure,” Eddie says, eyes darting back and forth over Richie with a noticeable heat. “I’ve been thinking about this like non-stop,” he says, kneeing back up onto the mattress, visibly biting into his lip while a hand slides up Richie’s chest. “Almost worse than the _hunger_ , Rich. I haven’t been this horny since I was like a teenager.”

Richie barely manages not to outright stare at the shapely flush of Eddie’s hard cock, forcing himself to look up with a weak, skeptical huff. “You don’t seem horny ever.”

“You’re so fucking blind,” Eddie snaps, an absolute picture of with his half-frown and his furrowed brow, cock jutting while he pretends to be pissed poking at Richie’s innocent ribs. “I’ve never been fucking subtle – Ow, _shit_ , you dickhead.”

Richie grins wider, pinching Eddie’s sides again before tugging him back onto him with a squeeze and a lift of his chin. “Oh, darling, my face is up here.”

Eddie narrows his eyes, leaning down close. “ _No_ Voices in bed.”

“No fun,” Richie says, swallowing a little while Eddie turns his head to bite soft at his jaw, then further down his neck, just little pinpricks of sensation from his narrow teeth. He arches against the attention, thinking inexplicably back to the airport bathroom and Eddie’s look at him from over his wrist, a small purr in his voice, which he knows now was probably a come-on – fuck, he is _totally_ into the vampire shit with Eddie, full stop.

Eddie sits up a few seconds later to loom, both hands across Richie’s biceps and bearing over him with an open grin, blood staining his teeth and looking like the very embodiment of a hot vampire in a bodice ripper, minus a poofy shirt, but honestly that’s a plus in Richie’s book. He thinks it probably would be for anyone, really, if they had any taste at all in trashy literature.

“Hey, yeah,” Richie says, a little faintly, then forcibly swallows hard while making a gesture downward with his chin and a sharp, suggestive wag of his eyebrows. “If I try to suck you off, are you going to kick me?”

Eddie blinks a couple times, plainly bemused, then actually grins wider while his brows go up his forehead. “Maybe, but probably won’t be for the same reason as the last guy.”

“Fuck you, Eds, I could be amazing at sucking dick,” Richie says, sliding his hands down to Eddie’s hips with a squeeze, feeling pretty daring while pressing his thumbs into the frankly insane crease of his hips. He thinks he could easily come without Eddie touching him any more than this, especially if he gets his mouth on him, but it would be worth it.

Eddie slowly drags his teeth across his lip, then drops in for a brief kiss. “Do you want me on my back? Or do - do you want me like… fucking your mouth? Like porn?”

Richie finds himself speechless for a moment, a little worried he’s going to just come right there at the mental image. “Holy shit, Eddie, you cannot talk like that,” he manages tightly, looking over Eddie’s head to stare at the ceiling with a weak cough. “I’ll fucking just dust. Or come. Both.”

“Your game is so shit,” Eddie says, laughing again, but it’s only a couple snickering giggles while he flattens down against Richie for another kiss.

“Don’t need it, apparently,” Richie says, drawing Eddie back down again when he tries to pull away for one kiss, then another, thinking absently about their lack of breath. He thinks they might have passed some threshold a few seconds back, but keeps his fingers dug into Eddie’s hair to keep him in close, the noises between them only slick instead of panting, though he catches one or two that must just be by reflex. 

“How about…” Eddie says, mouth visibly bruised as he pulls back, both hands sliding tight around either side of Richie’s shoulders and squeezing, then slipping further up, as if he’s trying to map out the shape. “We just… jerk each other off?”

“Is uh, that what you were thinking about this morning?” Richie asks, mostly sure now but also just hopeful, slipping a leg between Eddie’s with a moan caught in his throat.

“Who said that was you?” Eddie says curtly, then immediately reveals himself with a snort, nose dipping down against Richie’s throat. “No, I was like – ” He shakes his head, voice lowering, then rocks heavily against Richie’s with a plainly deliberate thrust while latching on near his ear. “Pretty sure I was fucking you.”

Richie nearly chokes, his own hips lurching now at the thought. “Shit, we – “ He clears his throat weakly, then harder, “We need to talk about your porn consumption.”

“Fucking whatever,” Eddie says lowly, hands sliding down Richie’s front to grope at his hips, his stomach, teasing around his jutting cock with a particularly cruel slide of fingers. “You’ve been an oversexed asshole since _forever_.”

“Oh man, I just wish,” Richie mutters, taking a few seconds to just watch Eddie move before stretching his arm back awkwardly to dig the lotion from inside the bedside table. He’s having a hard time looking away, wanting to study every new angle of Eddie that he’s never gotten to see so close; the simple jut of his bare hip or the way a muscle flexes with every brief shift of his shoulders.

It’s a little intimidating to actually be doing something he’s fantasized about in a hundred different ways, even in some where it went wrong, but soon he’s really got his slick hand wrapped around Eddie Kaspbrak’s actual cock; he can feel him shudder full body on top of him. He finds himself trying to memorize the weight and shape of the cock in his hand with sweeps of his thumb and slips of his fingers, while his other hand gropes hard at Eddie’s ass, holding him down to better grind up against the crease of Eddie’s hip with every tug.

“Shit,” Eddie says, groaning loud and cock jerking in Richie’s grip, shifting his hand to turn Richie’s head for a brief, smacking kiss. “I love that color in your eyes.”

“You – really?” Richie says, blinking back with a slack jaw, only for the moment to break when Eddie shifts his hips with the clear intent for Richie’s to start jerking both of them together. He avoided it to start with because he knew he might come too quick, and that is quickly proving true with every slick thrust of Eddie’s cock flush up against his own dick. “Oh, fuck – fucking, _christ_ , Eds.”

“Richie,” Eddie murmurs, as his fingers slip down away from Richie’s hip to abruptly twist in between Richie’s grip in mostly even strokes. “Come on.”

Richie chokes outright, rocking desperately into the pressure, wetting his lips across a gasp when Eddie shoves an arm right at his face plainly encouraging him to bite. He hears a throatier repeat of Eddie’s earlier moan as the blood hits his tongue, a fuzzy satisfaction making his hips jerk even harder against their combined strokes, feeling a keen building in his throat while he grips hard against Eddie’s ass with his free hand. He ultimately, reluctantly releases Eddie’s arm with a wet gasp, then a stuttering shout breaking out against the ceiling.

“ _Fuck_ , Rich, what was – ?” Eddie pants, arm flexing tight under Richie’s chin, then he’s surging up and his teeth pierce down into Richie’s shoulder; the bond heralds his orgasm loud and song-like while he ruts hard against Richie’s loose hand a last few times, before gradually, slowly going loose with a satisfied mumble.

Richie realizes he’s humming as their habitual breaths fade, or maybe it’s purring, which he’s not sure he’s ever done; it feels weird, a little physical feeling he’s not sure of the origin of, but it seems to get a little weaker when Eddie starts to move, sliding off of Richie and more onto the mattress. He should ask Eddie, maybe, if that’s what it feels like for him; he seems real good at it.

“Hey, Richie,” Eddie whispers, and a glance over sees him staring back, eyes soft and brown, half-lidded with emotion. It’s a look that is not-quite familiar, half some sentiment Richie understands, a plain sort fondness, but also something in it seems so much deeper; darker and heavier.

“Eds, come on,” Richie mumbles, turning over away from the attention, feeling at once overwhelmed with how the Eddie-specific thrum under his skin is now buzzing stronger and how his eyes are suddenly fucking watery. He feels more satisfied in his skin than he has in years, maybe decades, and then Eddie’s here plainly _wanting_ him and _touching_ him –

“Richie?” Eddie says, his voice pitching and fading bond abruptly broadcasting tight concern while he lightly touches high up on Richie’s arm.

“All good,” Richie says, blinking against a red film of tears while shoving his face harder into the pillow. “Just happy, promise.”

Eddie shifts up the bed closer behind Richie, a hand forcing his head up from the pillow to slip around his shoulder and curl around his neck, then pulling him into his chest. “Me, too,” he says, other hand sliding into Richie’s hair and altogether bodily curving around his head with a pair of sloppy kisses against the exposed side of his face. “Yeah. Good – _great_.”

Richie snorts a little, not quite sure what to do with the hands around his face except enjoy them, feeling cocooned while Eddie cradles them tightly together. He shifts his shoulders a little, so he’s not digging awkwardly in any places, but mostly that it’s easier to look at the edge of Eddie.

“Me, too,” Eddie repeats quietly, pressing another kiss to Richie’s face, closer to his mouth. “Always.”

Richie shuts his eyes tight with a hard swallow, pressing his slightly helpless grin into the flat of Eddie’s arm. He slips into a heavy-limbed sort of doze a few comfortable seconds later, Eddie all around him, but doesn’t quite fall asleep, as it sadly only lasts a few scant minutes before Eddie starts fidgeting, ultimately peeling off Richie with murmurs under his breath about wipes.

Richie turns with a half-formed murmur to watch Eddie swiftly shift from satisfied to fussy, feeling a smile stretch wide across his face. He feels sated in the best possible way, the hum in the back of his head sitting now comfortable, no longer at all anxious, and he has zero urge to move an inch. He spreads his arms across the mattress just to emphasis it, wiggling his fingers in a wave when Eddie turns to frown.

“We got blood on everything,” Eddie complains, grabbing and tugging Richie’s pillow off the bed, right out from under his head. He starts scrubbing at his middle with in unlucky shirt, “And _come_. Why is sex always so goddamn messy? And then this vampire shit part of it makes it even _worse_.”

“Later problem,” Richie says, nuzzling his cheek flat on the mattress while Eddie continues to scowl. “You’re like… way more into that _shit_ , you know.”

Eddie returns from throwing the pillows and clothes downstairs to put his hands on his hips. “What the fuck does that mean?” He asks flatly, like he thinks it’s going to lead into some kind of bad joke.

“Like…” Richie hums, pulling an arm in when Eddie settles back down next to him, surprisingly leaving the rest of the sheets be in some maybe-orgasm-effected show of indolence, which is good to know for the next time Richie makes a huge mess. “You know… getting hot for blood, being all territorial, casually seducing innocent victims –” He smirks when Eddie laughs brusque, but loud, the bright noise a cherry on this cake of a night. “But mostly, you know, slipping around in shadows – I told you I can’t even do that.”

“Hell, Rich,” Eddie says, proceeding to roll half over Richie’s back and mouth dull at his nape, though seemingly just to be affectionate. “You just have to know where you’re going.”

Richie grins small and turns his hand when a smaller one wraps around it, lacing their fingers tight together.

He might finally be figuring that out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~I tried to describe like a very soft headlock.~~

**Author's Note:**

> I can also be found on twitter [ @ ezlebe](https://twitter.com/ezlebe?lang=en)


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